


I Could Make You Care

by girllikesubstance



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Alcohol, Canon-Typical Violence, Drama, F/F, Gen, Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Mental Health Issues, Smoking, Trans Female Character, Transphobia, Trauma, all of these people need help and not a single one will admit it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-25
Updated: 2020-05-08
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:15:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 32,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23303767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/girllikesubstance/pseuds/girllikesubstance
Summary: You'd give your last breath to keep the Mojave alive, and another one after that to reunite Veronica and Christine. You were not anticipating that this would turn out to be so literal.[A novella in four parts. Complete.]
Relationships: Christine Royce/Veronica Santangelo
Comments: 36
Kudos: 77





	1. when the moon comes over the mountain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which nobody is brave enough to tell you Charisma is a dump stat.

You walk in through the open doors of the Lucky 38, limping, your aches vibrating through every bone in your body, and you say:

"Well hey, fellas. I'm back."

The hubbub dies in an instant. You wonder what you look like to all these people. Like hell, probably. Worn-out, weather-beaten, covered in new scars, hair shaved and growing back as awkward grey fuzz. Like a woman who's seen far too much recent hand-to-hand combat for someone trudging gamely through her fifties in the Mojave wasteland. So yes: you look like hell. And – you realise, as Veronica bears down on you with a face like a deathclaw who's just realised you're holding her egg – like a woman who's about to get told off in full view of all her colleagues.

"What the _hell_ ," she says, her voice breaking over you like a bucket of ice water. It's all you can do not to shiver; you love to be proved right, but somehow she manages to take the joy out of it.

"Jesus," you say. "You step out for five minutes and everyone starts giving you the third degree."

"Five minutes? Try _five months_."

God, she makes it so easy. The jokes practically write themselves.

"Hey, you kids been coordinatin'? Arcade said the same thing."

"I'm serious."

She stands there, glaring at you. She's pretty good at it, though she's got the advantage of youth and good rest: all tall and glowery with her arms folded, while you're over here leaning on an old roulette table trying not to keel over. Usually, the former casino floor is a hive of activity, papers and arguments flying across the tables as the Council of the Mojave Union goes about the messy business of keeping the most fractious community in the wasteland running; right now, though, everyone is dead silent. Dozens and dozens of pairs of eyes, all watching their asshole chair get chewed out.

Ugh. Okay. You are definitely gonna have to sit down.

"Okay," you say, easing yourself stiffly down onto the nearest bar stool. "Look. I was away slightly longer than I anticipated―"

"You're telling me."

"―but I did have a good reason."

You take off your aviators and look up at her. Although that's selling it short; this is the Look, the old Vegas stare, the one you've heard they say you gave Lanius when you talked him into retreat, right before you smiled and plugged the slaving bastard in the back of the neck. (That's not quite how it went down, but you let them think it is. Look, you have a community to run. And besides, you did just admit you were an asshole.)

Veronica looks back, unimpressed. Figures. It's kinda hard to intimidate someone who's seen you being throttled by a super mutant before.

"I was followin' a trail," you say. "Two of 'em. Tip from a friend." You don't tell her his name. You never have, and you suppose you probably never will. There are some things that nobody needs to know about you. "All the way through the Big Empty to the Sierra Madre."

Veronica's eyes widen. Beyond her, you can see the waves of consternation passing through the motley selection of Followers, Families reps and Freesiders who make up your council. These are big names you're dropping – mythical, even. Haunted by old America and the sins it left behind. They aren't places that people go. Or at the very least, not places from which they return.

But then, you aren't a person, are you?

It's good to have an audience again. You can feel yourself shifting in your seat, moving your back and shoulders into a position. In this moment, you are every mysterious stranger in every dive bar from here to New Reno, dusty and wind-blown, with a story to tell to anyone who'll stand you a drink. And you are back in your element.

"Got a little caught up in some business along the way," you go on, laying your hat on the bar. "Need to talk to you about that, actually. Arcade and Julie too, scrape together some Followers who can make somethin' of what I've found. But back to my point." A smile. It's the only thing about you that's better than when you set out: the fancy auto-doc in the Big Empty replaced your missing teeth and filled a bunch of others. Your signature grin, back and better than ever. "I followed those trails all the way to the end. And I found some people."

You let the smile fade and your shoulders straighten out. You look Veronica dead in the eye.

"I found Elijah, Veronica. And I found Christine."

* * *

You've known Veronica four years now. You met in the brutal part of 2281, the year you decapitated three states and pulled the Mojave Union out of your hat; you fought through half the vaults in Nevada together, stood side by side at Hoover Dam, and when the dust settled, you couldn't think of anyone better to help pick up the pieces. People like her, people who can see beyond caps or dogma to the bigger picture, are hard to come by out here. Besides, it pays to have someone in your administration who knows the Brotherhood.

So you're close, is the thing. You trust her, and you like to think she trusts you, too. And yet, in all that time, and despite the fact that she's told you all the parts of her life story – she's never once uttered the name of the woman she loved.

Not till now.

The two of you sit alone in the cocktail lounge of the Lucky 38, right at the top of the spire, with the shades pulled down a little to fend off the fierce Mojave sun. It was always your favourite room in the casino. Light and bright and airy, with a view of Vegas to die for. The city sprawling on all sides, cupped in the vast blue palm of the sky.

Veronica looks out with you, silent. It's fine. You're home again now; you have all the time in the world.

"I thought," she begins, then breaks off, shakes her head. "I don't even know what I thought." She turns to face you. "You're sure?"

"Yeah." You smile sadly, squeeze her shoulder. It's all unfeigned. Looking at her now, after the nightmare of the Empty and the Madre, you think you couldn't love her more if she really was your daughter. "Elijah … well, you told me what he was like. He ain't changed, sweetheart. Or if he has, he's got worse."

Veronica's face darkens. You can't blame her. Elijah was like a grandfather to her, right up until he wasn't any more. Until the day he proved that all that really mattered to him was finding an old world gun big enough to blow the whole Mojave's head off, and the Brotherhood were just a means to his end.

"Why didn't you tell me?" she asks, after a moment. "When you set out? I would have come, you know I would."

"I didn't know for sure," you tell her. "And it's been what, ten years? More? Would've been cruel, openin' that wound again without knowin' if there was anythin' at the end of the trail."

"I," she begins, then seems to think better of it, the fight withering and pulling back out of her face. "I guess … I guess you're right." Pause. "Thank you," she says. "That was kind of you."

You shrug.

"'S what I do, sweetheart. Shall I go on?"

"Yeah."

"All right. So Elijah, he went to the Big Empty. Lookin' for superweapons, I think. But the Brotherhood had heard about his crimes by that point. Sent an enforcer after him."

She catches your meaning right away. You can see it in the shock on her face.

"But … but she left the Brotherhood. When her parents tried to split us up."

"Not exactly." You hesitate. This is the hardest part. You thought it over so many times, on the long journey home, but you never quite managed to decide how you were going to say it. "It … was Elijah, Veronica. Christine wasn't running from her parents. He didn't wanna share you, so he forced her transfer to the Circle of Steel and cooked up the cover story. I guess maybe that's why they sent her. They knew she hated him. Wouldn't give up."

Veronica makes a small involuntary noise that you both pretend didn't happen. You wait, giving her space as the heartbreak spreads slowly across her face – and then, at last, she sighs.

"God." She takes a sip of her drink. "I really thought she got out. I thought – even if she couldn't stay, she was free to move on. Find someone else. But I should've known better. Not like I could get out, either, till – well, till you." She waves the glass at you. In thanks or just as punctuation, take your pick. "Go on."

"She caught up with him in the Big Empty." You can see it now: the pre-war internment camp, its inhabitants long since ghoulified. They couldn't leave. Trapped in there by the bombs locked around their necks. Two hundred goddamn years, sitting in that cage while the Think Tank ripped the crater apart around them. "He was experimentin' with bomb collars. Saw the reflection on her scope, drove his subjects at her and detonated the collars. Escaped."

"Oh my god." Veronica closes her eyes for a moment. "He really … he would." She sighs. "And Christine?"

"Med bots dragged her away. She …" Was experimented on, until Ulysses dragged her away to his little nest. Something involving electrodes, something vicious enough to strip out her ability to read. But maybe that's news for later. "Lived," you finish. "Followed Elijah to the Sierra Madre, where she got locked in an auto-doc till I let her out. We got to talkin', and the whole story came out."

She smiles weakly.

"You do have a way of making people tell you their life stories."

"Kinda just happened. Was a stressful situation." Your turn to sigh now. That's a big understatement, even for you. "Elijah had been camped out at the Madre for a few years. Catchin' people who came near. Puttin' bomb collars on them, trying to use 'em to crack the casino open and weaponise it. There's this poison fog, they call it the Cloud, and these security holograms …" You shake your head. "He got Christine, and he got me too, which was his mistake. Cracked the vault and let his greed do the rest. He walked in, I walked out and locked the door. Ain't the kinda lock that's ever openin' again."

Veronica breathes out. Slow. Careful. Like she's not sure her lungs can take it.

"He's gone, then," she says. "Forever."

Except for his ghost. The frequency Elijah used to broadcast instructions to the speakers in the collars is still active; you had his voice in your ears every step of the way back from the Madre to the Sink, where you finally found the tools to cut the thing off without detonating it. Begging and pleading and cursing your name to the grave, just like all his test subjects used to do to him. Eventually the signal started looping, and maybe that was worse.

Veronica doesn't need to know any of that, though. This is your sin, and your cross alone to bear.

"One way or another," you say, which is mostly true if you think about it.

Her face is very still. Too still, really.

"It doesn't matter," she says, though you're not sure she's talking to you. "He died when we all retreated to Hidden Valley. I didn't expect to see him again. No one did."

She looks very young all of a sudden. And you know, you _know_ , that all the people you affectionately refer to as your kids are grown-ass adults, that Veronica will be thirty-one this year, but she still looks so young. And so you set down your beer, and you put your arm around her shoulders.

"I know, sweetheart. I know."

She sniffs, rubs her eyes quickly with the heel of her hand.

"Mm," she says, pulling away again. "And, uh … I'm guessing Christine …"

"She's a stubborn motherfucker," you say flatly. "I can see why you like her. I told her, Veronica's with the Followers now, no Brotherhood around to tell her who she can and can't see, and she said, I gotta watch the Madre. Make sure nobody ever lets the poison out the way Elijah wanted to."

"She said that?"

You flutter a hand, light, dismissive.

"I may be paraphrasin'. But she was bein' real noble and tragic, and I told her that noble, tragic people don't get to come home and get railed by hot scientists―"

"Oh my god, you _didn't_ ―"

"―and she said, I have a duty, and I said, yeah, to Veronica, and she said, it's ancient history, we've both moved on, and I said, you're gonna have to try harder than that to lie to me." You scowl at her. You are irrepressible. It's important to the idea of you that you be irrepressible. "What? You sayin' you _ain't_ a hot scientist?"

"That is not even close to the part of that sentence I have an issue with," she says. "C'mon."

She's smiling, though, so you think it's okay.

"I have like a thousand questions," she says, picking up her drink again. "But I gotta be honest, after all you just said … there's one I need to get out there right away."

Of course. You only play with stacked decks; you knew before you sat down how the cards were going to fall.

"Shoot."

Veronica drains her glass in one and smacks it down on the polished tabletop.

"How do we get to the Sierra Madre?"

* * *

You will take her there. But you just got back, and the Madre and the Empty kicked the shit out of you, and Vegas has been swirling drunkenly along without you for five months. You've got some stuff to take care of first.

So: a bath. A good long hot one, in which you boil down all the aches the wasteland has inflicted upon you into a soft pale slime that pools at the base of your chest, and then let them drain away with the water when you're done. You emerge revived, clean, new. Ready to put yourself back together and get to work.

As you rise from the tub, you catch your eye in the mirror across the room. Pause. Lean on the sink, tilting your head this way and that to see the edges of the surgery scars peeping out from beneath your newly regrown hair. Pale canals in your brown skin.

"Kept my promise," you say, flicking open your razor. "Well, a bath rather than a shower. But like you asked."

Your brain doesn't say anything, of course. It hasn't since the auto-doc stuck it back in and made the two of you one again. But that last conversation you had with each other left you acutely aware of the value of a little common courtesy.

It helps to cling to these things. To the lightness, to the distance that turns tragedy into comedy. You will never forget what happened to you in the Big Empty, or to Christine, or to any of the lost souls you encountered there. But you are you, and the day you acknowledge that you're human is the day you cease to exist.

"No problem," you tell your brain. "Now hold still while I get this shit off the both of us."

When you were young, in those dim and distant years before Caesar's boys came, you wore your hair long and braided, in the fashion of the assholes that made you. After you fled west to New Reno, you got carried away with your freedom and cut it all off before realising your mistake and sheepishly growing it out again. Now – well, now you're fifty-three and grey as an old ghoul, and as far as you're concerned, the auto-doc had the right idea when it shaved your head to crack it open and suck your brain out.

Besides, you reflect, as the hair falls like dirty snow from your scalp and jaw. You're never going to learn to like these scars unless you flaunt them.

* * *

"First of all, I'd like to welcome back the official chair of the council. Our courier, Sixes."

There's a joke in this, somewhere deep beneath the surface where even you know better than to search for too long. Veronica calls you Sixes because of your tattoo, and most of the council have followed suit, not knowing your name, nor that the one man in the wasteland who does will never use it.

A thought for another time. You aim your smile down the table at the faces that turn towards you, dazzle them with your charm. They look glad to see you, though not as half as glad as you feel to see them. Julie and Arcade from the Followers, of course, next to a securitron currently streaming Yes Man. The King from Freeside, along with Francine, the owner of the sole brain cell the Garret twins have between them. Clayton and his crew from Westside. Even the damn Family reps; you never thought you'd be happy to see Marjorie, but there's a first time for everything.

"Thanks, Veronica," you say, half-raising a hand in greeting. "Good to be home. And to see that Vegas ain't burned down without me."

"It's good to see you too," says Arcade. "I trust you're going to tell us where you managed to find a _dentist_ in the _Mojave?_ "

You wink. It is dashing and ebullient, as it always is. Nobody will ever know what the price of these teeth was.

"A lady's gotta have her secrets," you tell him. "Look, I got a lot to tell y'all, but I wanna know how we're doin' first."

He rolls his eyes, but he's smiling, of course.

"All right, all right. Veronica?"

"Sure," she says, flipping through her notebook. "Okay. I can give you facts and figures later―"

"I wish that you wouldn't."

"―I _will_ give you facts and figures later," she continues, raising her eyebrows at you, "but we're ticking over. A couple of months ago, we got some more of those raiders – you know, all the guys the 80s chased out from upstate? – but nothing the militia couldn't handle. Tourism's holding steady."

"With the Ultra-Luxe ahead of all the rest, of course," adds Marjorie, unable to resist taking a dig at the other casinos.

"Sure, baby, you tell yourself that," says Swank, with a lazy grin that makes her curl her lip in disgust. "Everyone knows we're the tops."

"Everyone except my accounting subroutines," puts in Yes Man cheerfully, pissing them both off at once. "The Ultra-Luxe is the clear leader for this quarte―"

"Thanks for that one, sweetheart," you say. As fun as an argument would be, you really don't want this meeting to go on any longer than necessary. You have a very important appointment with the presidential suite and about thirteen solid hours of sleep; the only reason you're doing this first is because you won't be able to fall asleep until you know what state Vegas has got itself into in your absence. "Movin' right along, how's our development project goin'?"

"Slowly," admits Veronica. "We're still putting the word out, you know, New Vegas is willing to pay a premium for any and all medical and education professionals, but there's still this idea that the Mojave isn't safe. People kinda like the idea of the frontier, especially with a council stipend, but not if they have to leave the protection of the NCR."

Fair enough. You do what you can to keep the Mojave stable – securitrons and militia groups, radio stations and a few ex-rangers who figured they'd stick with the desert over Oliver – but it's nothing like having the massive resources of the fat old bear over the border.

"Well, I guess I can't blame 'em for that," you say, with a sigh. "Power? Water?"

"Exports are going strong. Emily Ortal, from the Followers―"

"Yeah, I know her. Good with machines."

"Of course you know her," she mutters, just loud enough for you to hear. "Anyway, yeah, she's been working with Yes Man to try and get the old H&H factory up and running, but that's been slow going."

"The place is really, _really_ broken," says Yes Man confidingly, leaning in and cupping a claw to his screen as if to shield a mouth he doesn't have. "But Mr House had all kinds of information on it! I'm confident we can have it operational again!"

"And I share in that confidence," you say, with a smile. "See? You barely even needed me."

Glances are exchanged, up and down the table. You could map allegiances this way: Julie looks at Arcade, the King at Clayton, Swank at Carlitos, Marjorie at Francine. It makes your heart swell a little in your chest. Half these people didn't know each other before you formed this council, and the other half hated each other's guts; now here they all are, barely even aware that they've ended up forming alliances.

Looks like they're figuring out which of them is going to contradict you. And, judging by the look on Carlitos' face …

"Hey, I'm gonna give it to you straight," he says. "We could've fuckin' used you, courier."

You've always admired this about him. After you broke the Omertas and relaunched Gomorrah as the Pyramid, you put him and Joana in charge; that kind of gift would turn a lesser man into a sycophant and toady. But your instincts were right: the kid has principles, and if he thinks you're wrong, he'll tell you.

"Not sure I'd have put it quite like that," says the King, raising one impeccable eyebrow. "But I gotta agree. There ain't a lotta people who can make all these boys and girls play nice, y'hear? We got work to do, and you make it go smoother."

You consider. Joke, or not? No: this one's serious. If Vegas can't last without you, it can't last at all.

"Look," you say. "I know I was gone a little longer than I said, but―"

"Yeah, and where were you?" asks Carlitos. "Five months? What the fuck is that about?"

"I'll get to that, I just―"

"Actually, Sixes, we'd really appreciate it if you got to it now."

Julie this time, and that silences you. There aren't a lot of people who can do that, but Julie … well, put it this way: other than Veronica, she's about the only person you'd trust to chair the council in your place. There are a lot of Followers with good ideas, but not so many who can be persuaded to temper them with pragmatism.

"Five months is a long time," she says, in that particular voice she has, so maddeningly reasonable. "The Mojave still isn't completely stable, and your presence helps a lot in keeping things running. We weren't prepared for you to be gone so long."

Well. Faced with that, what can you say? You sigh and sit up straighter, massaging your head with one hand. Giving yourself a moment. And then, as you knew you would, you give in.

"I didn't expect to be away that long myself," you explain. "I was followin' up on some information I was given. Personal business relatin' to Ms Santangelo." You nod at her, watch her flush slightly as faces turn in her direction. "My journey took me to the Big Empty, and then on to the Sierra Madre, as I'm sure everyone knows by now. Sure you don't need tellin' how dangerous they are. Got myself into some, ah, tricky situations."

You indicate your new scars. You noticed people staring earlier, but it's best to be clear. They're the lever you need to move these people where you want them.

"I am not takin' questions about it at this time," you say, voice quiet, serious. "I hope you can respect that. But I will say, it's true that the Big Empty is a pre-war research facility, it's true it's still runnin', and it's true that I am now the owner and manager of the entire complex."

God, but you just _live_ for expressions like these. The shock, the awe, the are-you-fucking-kidding-me; it almost makes everything the brains did worth it.

Almost.

"Whole place is off-limits," you continue. "The situation over there's delicate, and I don't know that I can guarantee the safety of anyone crossin' the boundary fence." Pause. Give the words weight, the way only you can. "I only know four people who've escaped it, and you're lookin' at one of 'em. And believe me, fellas, I didn't get off lightly."

You smile. It's not your nice smile. This is the one that Oliver saw as you pulled out the terms of his surrender, and you can see the chill it casts cutting through the omnipresent heat to touch the spines of everyone present.

Hold the moment. Lean into it, make them afraid. Make sure that nobody is ever brave enough to go throwing their lives away in the Empty. And then―

"But I'm back now," you say, letting your smile loosen and the tension leave your shoulders. "And I'm plannin' on bringin' the goods back with me. Two things to start, but I've got the staff workin' on a few more. Number one: food. There's machines there can render vegetable matter down into gloop and reform it into any plants you want."

Jaws, meet tabletop. But you're nowhere near done yet.

"I'm expectin' an industrial version ready by the end of the year," you continue. "Once we get it up and runnin', that's our supply issues over. We can grow cactuses and grass and turn it into maize, get food on tables and think about somethin' more than just survival."

If you listened hard, you think you might be able to hear Arcade's mind being blown. When you first met him, he joked that he was trying to figure out a way to make stimpaks out of barrel cactuses. Now – well, now it isn't so much of a joke any more, and if his eyes bulge out much more he's going to have to pick them up off the floor.

Wait till he hears about the Madre vending machines. But you're going to sit on that one a while longer, have the Think Tank develop it a bit further. The world isn't ready for matter recombination just yet.

"Number two," you say, before anyone has had a chance to recover, "there's a robot factory, and they got blueprints for pretty much everythin'. While we're workin' on the steelworks and H&H, we can get new securitrons shipped in from the Empty, keep the militia stocked."

You direct that last part at Yes Man. Security is his brief; with the securitron radio network and the Lucky 38's supercomputer at his disposal, there's no one better placed to coordinate the militia across the Mojave.

"Also found a kinda Handy I never seen before, medical sorta thing, called Mister Orderly. Got six of 'em scheduled for delivery on the 5th. I want 'em thoroughly tested under Followers supervision, but I figure if we can't get doctors, we'll just have to make our own."

You lean back, look at the startled faces. And then, just as it looks like Veronica might have something to say in response, you add:

"One last thing. Sorry, I was lyin' when I said two." You reach below the table and bring out the bag you've carried with you since the Madre. Let it fall to the tabletop with a thump, pulling open the neck to show the warm yellow gleam within. "Got a little somethin' to donate to the teachin' fund," you announce, easing the gold bars out into view. "Let's see what kinda teacher don't want a slice of this."

The council stare, silent. Utterly speechless. And you breathe in their awe, the corners of your lips turning irresistibly upwards, and the broken things in your chest at last begin to tremble slowly back to life.

* * *

It's like music. That's the only way you can think of to describe it. You find your rhythm, you let your instincts take over. You keep improvising, keep bringing the bow back and forth across the strings, and when you open your eyes you see everyone else grinning, nodding, tapping their feet. And as long as you don't stop playing, you can keep the rhythm going, keep everyone dancing to your tune. Keep the council playing nice. Keep New Vegas stable. Keep the Mojave – your beautiful, brutal, fucked-up Mojave – keep the Mojave alive, just one more day.

There's a price. There's always a price. But you'll pay your heart, your soul and every last scrap of humanity you have to keep the song going a little longer.

* * *

You dream, as every night, of the Empty and the Madre – of sawblades buzzing in your skull, Elijah's rambling over the radio, Klein's pompous monologuing. Scorpions with lasers and ghosts with knives. When you wake, your neck itches with the phantom pressure of a bomb collar and you have to get out of your bedroom right away, before it blows your head to bits along its fault lines. You pull on a shirt, brew a pot of coffee, and head outside to catch your breath.

The morning air is sweet and delicious, so you light a cigarette to poison it to your liking and take your cup of coffee down the Strip to Freeside, where it's still dark and quiet, the sun glowing softly over the edge of the junk wall to the east. There's a spot you like, a little way up New Vegas Boulevard near the Kings base, where an enterprising woman like yourself can climb up a pile of rubble to the hidden upper floor of an abandoned building with a killer view across the ruins to Lake Mead.

You make the climb, unfold the old lawn chair you brought here when you first found the place, and settle down to watch the night bleed slowly from the sky.

It's so good to be home. You never really knew how much this _was_ home until now. For so many years, you said you came from Reno; you said it so much that you half believed it, thought you could picture the face of your long-suffering father and the smile of the older sister who practically raised you. When you talked about it, you felt your face shift into a fond, nostalgic kind of look, all by itself. Then came that job and the long walk to Vegas, further east than you'd dared go since you fled Arizona as a kid – and just like that, you realised how shallow the Reno lie was. Vegas was home before you'd ever even set foot on the Strip.

A strained grunt reaches your ears, and you hide a smile in a sip of your coffee. Poor kid. He always did struggle to keep up on the road. Still, it's kind of him to come. You figured he would – your secret hideaway is not really so very secret, not to those who know you well enough – but you appreciate him making the effort.

For a couple of minutes you sit and smoke, pretending not to notice his awkward attempts at climbing up the rubble, and then at the sound of his voice you turn in your seat as if you just noticed him.

"Ah, caffeine and cigarettes," says Arcade. "The most balanced of breakfasts."

You wink, lift your mug in an ironic salute.

"You know me, sweetheart. I'm verrry health-conscious."

Arcade wrinkles his nose.

"Is that the garbage that you call coffee?"

"It _is_ coffee."

"It's ground coyote tobacco and honey mesquite," he says. "It's what we in the medical business call 'a hot mess'."

"Hey, how 'bout that? That's what my mom used to call me, too."

He sighs and takes a seat on the other chair.

"I don't suppose you have another cup?"

"Never leave home without one."

You turn the other mug the right way up and pour out the other half of the pot. He takes a sip, grimaces, and then takes another.

"That truly is vile," he says.

"Just keep drinking. You'll learn to like it."

"I'm sure I'd acquire a taste for deathclaw feet if that was all I had to eat, but that doesn't mean I _should_."

"Don't knock it till you've tried it," you advise. "You marinade one of those till the hide softens, slow-cook it …" You kiss your fingertips and open your hand. "Rotisserie heaven, sweetheart."

Arcade rolls his eyes.

"Remind me never to attend one of your dinner parties."

"Mighty presumptuous of you to assume you'd be invited."

A little hiss of laughter escapes him at that: you win this round, it seems. Clearly you've still got it.

"I'm, uh … glad you can still do this," he says, a touch awkwardly. His gaze is still fixed on the horizon, a faint blush rising in his cheeks. "When you said … well, uh, I was worried."

Under any other circumstances, you might say, _aw, Dr Gannon, I knew there was a heart somewhere underneath that lab coat of yours_. But things are a little too far gone for that.

"I'm glad too," you tell him, flicking your cigarette away and lighting another. "I couldn't, for a while. But I'm home, you know?"

He considers this for a moment. You've always liked that about him. Real thoughtful, when the situation demands.

"Yeah," he says. "I guess I do."

The two of you sit there for a while, drinking your coffee. Bit by bit, the light spreads above your heads, wiping away the stars with a dishrag soaked in sky.

Arcade wants to ask you about it. You can feel the questions humming inside him, friendly concern and scientific curiosity and medical fascination all demanding to know about what happened to you and the treasure you found. He just respects you too much to actually ask, after that display in the boardroom the other day.

"I will tell you," you assure him. "When I'm ready."

He nods, meets your eye briefly.

"I don't doubt it."

Another pause. A train chugs slowly west out of the rail yard near Lake Mead, and three black silhouettes flap heavily up into the air as it nears. Too big for crows. Zopilotes, maybe. They swarmed here after the battle and some stuck around to feed on Vegas trash. Everyone says they’re ugly, but people talk all kinds of shit. Your favourite bird, hands down.

"So," says Arcade. "How did you kill Caesar?"

You almost choke on your cigarette. That's a question you haven't been asked in a while. Back in 2281, you got it every other day, so much so that it became a game: every time someone asked, you made up a new, even more implausible answer. Arcade asked you about fifteen times, just to see if he could find the limits of your imagination, but he never did. You won every round.

And right now … well, right now you could just kiss Arcade, because there is nothing you'd like more after the last five months than to do something as light and pointless as play a game.

"Well, sweetheart," you say, finishing your coffee to give yourself time to think, "to appreciate this, you gotta understand that the guards at the Fort took away my guns, chems and alcohol when they let me in. But I managed to smuggle in a little flask of whisky in my boot."

"Of course," he says. "It would take more than a ruthlessly efficient military autocracy to come between you and your hooch, huh."

"Aw, Dr Gannon, you know me so well." You give him a quick flutter of your eyelashes and manage to make him smile. "Well, I got to doin' a few favours for Caesar, you know, sortin' out a few issues he had here and there. Nothin' that I figured would win him the battle, but things that would make him think I wanted him to. He's openin' up to me a little, y'know? He tells me about Hegel and Romans and shit like that, how he unified the East."

"A modern-day Kurtz in the Arizona heart of darkness, you could say."

"Absolutely," you agree, although you have no idea what he's talking about. "Anyway, on my next trip back to Vegas, I stop in with the Followers and ask about Hegel. Get some further readin', too. Now, next time I'm at the Fort, I'm talkin' Caesar's language, all dialectics and synthesis, and he's fuckin' excited to have someone who knows it, but he's terrified that his boys are gonna learn that he learned all this outta books and not from the gods like he said. So we go to his private quarters, just the two of us, and we―"

"This is just the same way you killed Benny," protests Arcade, but you bat his objections aside with an imperious wave of your cigarette.

"Wait, wait. So we're talkin', right, and I offer him a drink, and by that point he's loosened up just enough to say sure. I get out my whisky and pour a couple of glasses, and I drink mine first to prove it ain't poisoned – only polite – and then he drinks his and he swells up like a bloatfly and dies."

You sit back in your chair, toss him a look. Arcade just scowls.

"The glass," he says. "You poisoned the glass?"

You beam at him.

"Scariest drink I ever took," you say. "I was eighty per cent sure I knew which was the safe one. But twenty per cent is kind of a lot, when you think about it."

"Tch." He shakes his head, but he's smiling. "Well, I know that one can't be true. Even you aren't that stupid."

"Hey, you never know. Maybe I got hidden shallows."

"Don't you mean hidden depths?"

"God no, I'm too dumb for depths."

He chuckles.

"On that we are in complete and total agreement," he says. "I, uh … I better get back to the Fort. My shift starts soon. But … I'm glad to see you're all right."

"Always am when you're around, sweetheart. Thanks for the company."

You watch him make his careful way down the pile of rubble, then turn back to the view, to the sky and lake and the lazy plume of smoke over Camp Golf.

You think you feel a little better now, but honestly you don't know how you could possibly tell.

* * *

The days pass just like they always do, each sunset a promise, each sunrise its fulfilment. You make your rounds: Freeside, Outer Vegas, the Strip. You remember all the faces and almost all the names, and where you forget you bluff with such an easy confidence that nobody can tell. Little things. Pick up ED-E from the Freeside school where their recordings are put to use and take them for a tune-up; have a quiet word with Yes Man and get the securitrons to ship the crashed Big Empty drone to your safehouse; make the journey down to Lake Mead and check the hiding spot for a message from Boone. (Two notes, one recent. You wish he'd contact you more often, just so you know he hasn't run off to Arizona on a suicidal revenge quest, but you're aware that you're being hypocritical here.)

Bigger things too. The NCR ambassador needs to be managed, for one. The Chairmen whacked someone the White Gloves didn't want whacked. The Boomers need to be tactfully reminded that militia patrols are not acceptable targets for artillery practice. Nothing you can't handle, just a little bullying and sweet-talking and good old-fashioned assholery.

You get used to the way people's eyes now move up when they see you, from your face to your new haircut and the scars it shows. You carry your gun, but you don't draw it, not even when some young idiot tries to jump you in the new housing developments down in the South Vegas ruins. (He just needs money that badly. In the end, he leaves with a job as a council runner and tears on his cheeks.) You even pick up your violin again, for the first time since you left the Madre, and you write a new song that you actually kind of like.

And then one night you start awake and lift your head into the numinous non-place of the hours before sunrise. You head over to the window, still humming something you heard in the dream, and part the curtains to see a pair of securitrons scooting down the Strip towards a fight outside the Pyramid. Snatches of music on the wind with the smell of smoke and avarice. Above it all sits the moon, like someone nailed your platinum chip to the sky; and suddenly you know, with a chilly shock that hits you like two bullets to the forehead, that it's time.

You take a breath. Stretch out your hands before you: all your fingers, present and accounted for. You are here. You are the courier. You are ready.

Down one floor. Along the corridor. Five quick knocks on the door of suite seven: shave and a haircut.

Veronica answers already wearing her old travelling gear from her scribe days, her beloved power fist gleaming on her arm.

"Yeah?" she asks.

"Yeah," you say.

Neither of you say anything else. You take the elevator down to the darkened casino floor and slink off down the Strip, unnoticed in the wash of neon and desert moonlight. By the time the sun rises, Vegas has shrunk to a glittering smudge behind you.

Veronica looks at you. And for the first time all night, she smiles.

"Let's go make trouble," she says, just like old times, and you laugh, and you say:

"You know what, sweetheart? Let's."


	2. keep your eyes on the prize

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which you learn that things can always get weirder.

You used to walk the Mojave. It was a good gig, if you ignored the Legion, and the NCR, and the raiders and robots and wildlife and heat. But it was a good gig. You saw a whole lot of neat sunsets, drank a lot of okay beer in a lot of small towns. Punched a lot of geckos and more than a few men. Sometimes you went home with the stuff you scrounged, and every time you did another piece broke off your heart and fell down to rot at the bottom of your chest. But you haven't been back there in a long, long time.

Sixes has, though. You do your best not to think about the mechanics of that – how the Brotherhood girl can't go back, and the rootless asshole anarchist can pop in any time she likes. Better to think about walking the Mojave. Better to think about that right now, as you head south out of Vegas down the cracked expanse of the Long 15 and feel the old excitement stirring in your heart.

Dry earth and horsenettles. The grim bulk of Black Mountain to the south, a wash of grey against the lightening sky. Securitrons in the distance, rolling along on patrol through the ruins to the west.

It's going to be a beautiful day. You're good at your job – better than you ever expected you'd be – and you enjoy the work, but god, is it nice to get out of town for a while. Breathe in the clean desert air and revel in the weight of a power fist on your arm.

And the promise of a reunion in your future.

You risk a glance at Sixes, keeping pace alongside you. Cowboy hat, dark eyes, unbreakable smile. She looks good. Better than she has done since she got back: she has that easy calm back again. That way of carrying herself. Like she's got a whole pack of aces up her sleeve and she's waiting for her opponent to realise just how screwed they are.

Well enough for you to finally ask, maybe.

"So," you say. "Can I ask questions?"

You seem to take her by surprise. She glances at you in that quick, sidelong way, one eyebrow perfectly arched. A perfect picture of herself.

"You ain't ever needed my permission before," she says, a hint of a question in her voice.

"It's different now," you tell her, shrugging. " _You're_ different."

Sixes' other eyebrow joins the first.

"Can't argue with that," she says. "Don't worry. I'm still your courier."

You know that. But the courier isn't something she _is_ , it's something she _does_ , and while she's proved over the past couple of weeks she can do that the same as ever, you're not so sure it's the same person doing it.

It's hard to know how to tell her this, though. Somehow it seems weird to think of Sixes having a problem that you can help with instead of the other way around.

"Uh, right," you say. "What about my friend, though?"

She laughs, though you have to admit that she doesn't seem very happy.

"I'll always be your friend, sweetheart. Promise."

It feels like the kind of thing that's meant to end a conversation, so you let it go for now; this is a long trip, after all, and you know how to be patient. Sixes is an irredeemable liar, but she won't break a promise, or not to you at least, and she'll tell you everything when she can. You aren't really sure where you're going, but you don't question it when Sixes leads you off the road, towards the ruins north of New Vegas Steel.

The sun inches higher and higher in the sky. You feel the sweat beginning to soak into the padded lining of your power fist. Kind of comforting, in the way that an old familiar discomfort can be.

"Me and Christine," says Sixes, unbidden, and suddenly you jump back to full alertness, your heart thumping against the wall of your chest the way it has done every time you hear her name again. Even now, it hurts; even now, you think your head might fall apart like a smashed mutfruit if you stop and think about her too much.

"Me and Christine," she says again, and this time you hear the unease in her voice. You hate it instantly. Even at Hoover Dam, as the legionaries swarmed across the bridge, she laughed and said that Lanius had better send a few more if he wanted to get the better of her. And now this. "We, uh … we both got caught up in some pretty bad stuff. Worst thing that's ever happened to me, actually, and I'm sayin' that as someone who got shot in the head and buried alive." She hesitates. "Christine got it worse than me," she says softly, meeting your eye with a bravery that frankly takes your breath away. "And she got it twice over, too. She's a nice girl, but you gotta know, sweetheart, she ain't the girl you left behind."

Your eyes travel upwards from Sixes' and come to rest on the scars protruding from beneath her hat. You might not have Arcade's medical training, but you have a pretty good idea what scars like that mean. And that – that happened to Christine, too. That and more than that. Whatever the hell that means.

You were right. Your head is definitely going to fall apart, because it's falling apart right now. Just like Sixes'. Just like Christine's.

"Sweetheart?"

You blink, tear yourself out of the thought. Sixes is looking at you, her face drawn. Neither of you are walking any more, although you don't remember stopping.

"Right, right." You look away quickly, start moving again. "Sorry."

A few more steps in silence. Dirt crunching beneath your boots. Gunfire in the extreme distance, raising a cloud of crows from the skeleton of an old building.

"Veronic―"

"What _happened?_ "

It comes out so fast you hardly even have time to realise you've said it. By the time you do, you've also realised that you're clutching Sixes' arm. Hard.

She doesn't throw you off. She gives you a long, grave look, then she carefully loosens your grip and takes your hand in hers.

"We're nearly there," she says, squeezing it. "C'mon. I'll show you."

* * *

But perhaps we're getting ahead of ourselves; let's give you a moment without Sixes at your side, or the weight of the Sierra Madre on your shoulders. Let's give you June 3rd, 2272.

You're eighteen and nervous, sitting in what Ibsen calls the broom closet (even though it doesn't have any brooms in it) and wishing that you had a little space to yourself instead of a narrow bed in a tightly-packed dorm. But that's Brotherhood life for you, uncomfortably constrained by the size of the Lost Hills bunker. Someday maybe you'll be important enough to get your own quarters all to yourself, but for now, you're stuck here in this crappy room on level 2 with twelve other scribes-in-training.

So: the broom closet. It's that or try to sneak outside to the hills, and even you know better than to try and make it past the knights on patrol.

"Thought I'd find you here."

You look up – half relieved, half guilty – to see Christine hanging off the edge of the doorway, watching you with those sharp blue eyes.

"I didn't realise this was a spectator sport," you say. "Close the door already, before someone sees."

She raises her eyebrows. She can only raise both together; you take great pleasure in flaunting your ability to move them independently, a habit that she says infuriates her but which you _know_ she secretly finds sort of charming.

"What, you have something to hide?" she asks.

"Yeah. The fact that I'm skulking around in broom closets, for starters."

"Right. Wouldn't want that one getting out there." She pauses just long enough to show you who's boss, then slips in and nudges the door shut behind her with her knee. "What's up?"

"Nothing. A little bit anxious, maybe."

Christine nods slowly. She doesn't ask what you're anxious about; she doesn't need to. The time is fast approaching when you'll be asked if you want to stick with the Brotherhood or leave to make your own way in the world. With how Christine's parents are about the two of you, you're afraid she'll say she wants to leave, and that you might not have the guts to follow her.

"Okay," she says. "Mind if I try to help with that?"

Perfectly deadpan. She has a poker face for the ages, always has done. But you have an inkling of where she's going here, and you can feel a smile tugging at your lips.

"Sure," you say. "Give it your best shot."

She drops lightly to the floor at your side, slips an arm around your waist and her head onto your shoulder, burrowing it into the folds of your robe with a deft twist of her neck. Automatically, you let your head fall against hers, close enough to smell her. Warm and rich, like the wind when it blows from the east. You don't know what's out there to give it that scent, but one day you'd like to find out.

A second passes. Then another. You feel a little like something inside you is melting, in the best possible way.

"How's that?" asks Christine, after a little while. "I have an escalation plan if this isn't doing it for you."

"An escalation plan?"

"Glad you asked, Ronnie."

She tilts her head up and kisses you. Which, you will freely admit, is pretty much exactly what you were after.

"There's a smile," she says. "I'll take that as a win."

"Really? I think you could do better."

"You must be better, if you're making fun of me. But …"

"But?" you ask.

"Well, there _is_ another level to the escalation plan," Christine informs you. "But unless you're feeling brave, we're gonna have to find somewhere even more private before we put that one into action."

You look at her, smiling too hard to answer. And that perfect poker face finally cracks into a grin, _her_ grin, sharp and broad as a wastelander's machete; and you wish that this moment could go on forever and ever, that the difficult choices in your immediate future could melt like your insides are right now; and in a way you'll get your wish, because in the years to come, when you think of Christine, this is what you'll think of: this moment, this closet, that grin that cuts you open as easy as a new knife and exposes your heart to the caress of the scented desert wind.

* * *

That was a long time ago. You're not the girl in the closet any more. But you suspect that maybe Christine isn't the girl who fucked you in there any more, either.

* * *

"What is this place?"

"It's a warehouse."

"Yeah, I do have eyes, you know. Why are we here?"

Sixes winks and opens the door.

"After you, sweetheart."

Okay. She's a complete ass, but fine, nothing new under the sun. You shoot her a _we're not done with this_ kind of look and head inside.

New build. Very new, actually: fresh concrete, not scavenged. Custom-made doors. No windows, but the walls are thick and buttressed with massive steel girders. This place was built recently, and without regard for cost. Like a giant strongbox.

A huge, solid, completely empty strongbox.

"What am I looking for?" you ask, turning around. Your voice echoes off the vaulted roof like a handful of caps rattling around in a tin can.

"Nothing yet," says Sixes. "This is where exports from the Big Empty arrive. Will arrive, I mean, when they start. Secret room in the back there has a homin' beacon in it. Anythin' that teleports outta the Empty will appear in here. Nice and safe."

Tele―?

She can't be serious. She can't … she is, isn't she?

"Teleport," you repeat. Slowly. Giving her time to contradict you.

Sixes' smile grows broader and meaner.

"Yep," she says, taking a gaudy little machine from her pocket, all diodes and antennae. "And if you wanna get back to the Empty in a hurry – which we do, 'cause it cuts two months off the journey – well, this is the place to be."

You have to hand it to her. No matter how long you spend together, no matter how many times you see Sixes pull some absolute unbelievable nonsense out of her ass – she still somehow manages to surprise you, every single time.

Teleportation. Actual goddamn teleportation! Sure, why the hell not.

"Do you just have spare keys to every single fortress in the wasteland?" you ask. "I mean, you get let into the Lucky 38 – weird, but okay. You get free passage in and out of the _Fort_ – well, lightning can strike twice, you know? You turn up with a magic key that teleports you into the heart of the Big Empty … that's just making the rest of us look bad."

"Heh. Sweetheart, the woman ain't been born who can make you look bad." Sixes tosses you the machine, which is pretty brave of her considering you're still wearing your power fist; fortunately, you manage to catch it in your other hand and not crush it into spare parts. "You wanna do the honours? Fair warnin', we gotta stand real close if we're gonna do two people. The field is, uh, let's say temperamental."

"Do I wanna fire off a _teleporter?_ " you ask, incredulous. "Yeah. I think maybe I do, thanks."

"Well, then." Sixes steps closer to you. A lot closer, actually; enough to make you really feel how much taller than you she is. How handsome. You don't really see her in these terms – she's more like a parent, and would still be even if you weren't an idiot still half in love with your teenage sweetheart – but sometimes it's hard not to notice. "Whenever you're ready."

Ready to teleport into the middle of an incredibly dangerous pre-war ruin? Honestly, you feel like it's about damn time. The past four years have been great – peaceful – historic – but far too devoid of opportunities for punching.

You look up into Sixes' eyes. She's got that look in them again, the one you haven't seen in a good long while now: bright and dangerous as casino lights, the look of someone who's about to get you into trouble.

Well, you think, it's not like there's anyone better to get into trouble with. And you bring your thumb down on the button.

* * *

The long and short of it is, you throw up. Apparently teleportation is pretty rough on your insides.

"Yeah, it's hard the first time," says Sixes, patting you on the shoulder. "Sorry, I figured I'd let you have your moment."

"Ugh," you mutter, straightening up and wiping your mouth. "You _asshole_."

"Hey, only my mom and Red Lucy get to call me that."

You have a real zinger of a response to that, you really do. Something to do with the rumours about her and Lucy and a back room in the Thorn full of chains. Probably toss in something to do with her mother too, why not. But at that point, your brain catches up with your eyes, and suddenly witty responses seem a touch beyond your capabilities.

Before you lie several densely-packed miles of concrete and steel and battered pipework, spreading out across the russet earth like the growth of a massive iron lichen. You see spires and silos, scaffolding and squat prefabs rusting away between the remnants of roads and railways; you see a pack of cyberdogs prowling across a nearby plaza, sniffing at mounds of junk and broken stones; you see, behind it all, a wall of towering steel antennae, their banks of bulbous rings rippling with something like heat haze.

You see two hundred years of old world genius, right there for the studying, and your scribe's heart skips a beat in your chest.

"Empty's pretty, ain't she?" remarks Sixes, cutting into your thoughts. "Murderous old bitch, but pretty."

"There's so much here," you murmur. "We could study this for _decades_ and never …"

"Oh, we will," she says, matter-of-factly. "Just not yet. Place has been runnin' wild for centuries. Gotta tame it first." She jerks her head at something – a door, you realise; you were so busy staring at the crater that you never even realised where you were, a balcony at the top of a tall tower. Centre of the facility, looks like. "C'mon in. My room's in here."

Ah, of course it is.

"Why is it that wherever you go, someone comps you the penthouse suite?"

"Didn't really have a choice about this one, sweetheart," she says, a little more seriously than you're comfortable with, and leads you into a suite that puts your Lucky 38 apartment to shame: open, spacious, clean as only something that never saw the war can be. The centre is dominated by a huge tabletop computer screen, which―

"Salutations and felicitations, sir," says the screen in a voice straight out of an old video, its surface rippling like an oscilloscope with each word. "I see you have brought a guest. Welcome to the Sink."

An AI? And – oh no. An AI that calls Sixes …

You steal a glance at her, wary, but her face gives nothing away.

"Thanks," she says. "This is Veronica Santangelo, a dear friend of mine. We're just passin' through. Back to the Sierra Madre, see that other friend I told you about."

"If sir thinks it best," says the AI, although its tone suggests that it itself thinks otherwise. "A pleasure to meet you, sir."

"Uh … likewise," you say. Should you …? God, you just don't know; you do your best to be good about these things, but sometimes the fact that you're a regular old cis woman who grew up in the world's most aggressively heteronormative bunker just smothers you in awkwardness. "You know we're both women, right?"

"Of course, sir," replies the AI apologetically. "Unfortunately―"

"Unfortunately the so-called genius who programmed every nightstand and coatrack in this room with its own AI personality never foresaw a woman walkin' in here," says Sixes, in a voice that could cut the moon right out of the sky. "Least he was honest about his chances, I guess. But it means that the Sink here don't have the word 'ma'am' in its vocabulary."

"A most colourful summary, sir," says the Sink, completely unperturbed. "I must once again offer up my most sincere apologies."

You almost wince. For something that has neither feet nor mouths, it sure does a great job of putting the one in the other.

"Hey," you say, before Sixes can get mad enough to put a bullet through the poor thing, "y'know, if you like, I could take a look at it? I mean, I _was_ a scribe and all. I know my way around a terminal."

Something leaves Sixes' face, some kind of tension, and you know you did the right thing.

"Yeah," she says. "That'd be great." She glances at the screen. "Sink? Give Veronica here full access. I'm gonna check in with the Think Tank, then we'll move on. Got places to be."

"Very good, sir," says the Sink – which, wow, credit where credit's due, this is a really special kind of obstinacy – and unfolds a little terminal from its side. "Sir may access my code from―"

"Yeah, I'll, uh, leave you to it," says Sixes quickly, ducking out through a side door. "Back in five …!"

You watch the door slide shut behind her, steel jaws closing over the ace of spades on the back of her duster. Then you turn back to the Sink and unbuckle your power fist. Time to see how much from Head Scribe Taggart's lectures actually stuck.

* * *

Not enough to deal with the horrific code here, honestly: if this stuff was written down on paper, it would be blotched with coffee stains, unnumbered and left out of order in a mouldy old box file. Fortunately, adding a word to the Sink's vocab is one of the less complicated operations. For some reason the apostrophe breaks it, but you've got it saying 'madam', at least.

You've also been interrupted three times by three different pieces of talking furniture, each of which appears to suffer from a separate major personality flaw. It feels a little like being trapped in some sort of joke, except every time you look up the punchline seems to have drifted further and further away.

"… ignore me, will you? I will see you _burn_ in the all-consuming flames of _hell!_ No one ignores the toaster and lives to tell the tale!"

"Don't mind him," says the tiny securitron that keeps trundling around the room like some fancy old world toy. "The toaster's just like that. But speaking of kitchenware, you wouldn't happen to have any mugs on you, would you?"

Delightful. How long is Sixes going to be, exactly?

"You mean the mugs I told you I didn't have two minutes ago?" you ask. "Yeah, I'll keep you posted."

"I appreciate it!" chirps the securitron. "God, I love mugs. And wish for death on a daily basis."

What the actual hell. Why would someone create a robot just to torture it this way? Not a question you can answer, so instead you just smile at him and walk away to investigate the apartment a bit further. Even outside the central workshop room, there's enough here to keep a whole unit of scribes busy for years: an auto-doc like you've never seen before, some sort of sonic pulse weapon, a hydroponics suite that looks to be an order of magnitude more efficient than anything you've ever seen, a―

A bomb collar, lying there on the nightstand in the bedroom.

You freeze for a moment, caught out by the stark violence of it. You've seen these things before – there are a few in the Hidden Valley stockpile, and when the securitrons razed Caesar's Fort after the battle you had to defuse a lot of slave collars – but there's something different about seeing one here, like this. Knowing that it was once wrapped around Sixes' throat.

It looks rough. Carefully modded by someone, carefully unmodded by someone else – Sixes, presumably, in her attempts to remove it. Which means that the first modder must have been …

You knew there was more to Elijah than he let on, even before Sixes told you what he'd been up to after he abandoned the Mojave Brotherhood. His refusal to tell you what he was looking for in those memory units he had you hunt down. His fury at the NCR taking the Dam, the way he called them children playing with a bomb. You don't much care for the NCR either, but a normal person doesn't see electrical infrastructure and start thinking about deadly weapons.

(And then there's HELIOS One – but even now, with your past coming back to you in big bloody chunks, that's a memory you're not going to revisit.)

Elijah was dangerous. Selfish, obsessive, manipulative. He needed to be dealt with, for everyone's safety. But he was also the closest thing to a parent you had, until Sixes showed up at the 188 and listened to you the way nobody had in almost a decade. And now he's out there chaining bombs around your friend's neck.

Or at least, he was.

You breathe out, force yourself to turn away from the collar. You're really not sure what the protocol is, emotionally speaking, for when one of your kinda maybe sorta parental figures commits unspeakable crimes and gets locked away forever in a windowless vault by a completely different kinda maybe sorta parental figure. It's not the sort of thing that happens to people, you know?

"Well, hello there, sweetie," says a nearby light switch, as your eye falls across it. "Now what is a mysterious, _smouldering_ stranger like yourself doing here in our little old―"

"Nope, can't deal with this," you mutter, and you grab your power fist and storm out.

* * *

There's a reason that that closet is your abiding memory of Christine. It's because that's the last time you two were really happy together: one week later, you have the first and last fight you can remember having. She says she's leaving, that she can't stand her fucking parents and the fucking hate in their fucking eyes; you say no, we can make it work, please stay. As predictable as the sun in the sky and the rads in the water. You fight and fight until the noise brings paladins down to drag you apart, and the next time you see Christine is on her way out of the elders' conference room, after she gave her official answer about whether she wants to commit the rest of her life to the Brotherhood.

You look at her, unable to ask. She looks back, unable to answer. You both know that this is it, that you won't ever see one another again, but somehow the word _goodbye_ is just too much to ask. Until it's too late, and there's nothing left but regret.

Who can you turn to? Elijah, of course. Elijah, who alone of all the elders likes your iconoclasm, your reckless curiosity, your refusal to bend to dogmatism. You assume that means he likes you, too. So once you've had a chance to dry your face and put yourself together, you run to his quarters, and he sighs and motions for you to sit down at his side.

"I'm sorry, Veronica," he says. "I know she meant a lot to you."

"How could she?" you want to know. "How could she – I didn't even get to …"

"You know what it's like." His voice is so soft, so gentle. So plausible. "Once you're out, you're out. It has to be a clean break. And you have to know, Veronica, Christine was not happy here."

"But we could have made it work," you protest, tears pushing at the corners of your eyes. You want to control them, to be as tough as you think Elijah thinks you are, but it's so difficult. "I _know_ we could, I just – how come I couldn't …?"

Elijah sighs again.

"You argued your piece," he says. "I don't think you need to blame yourself."

"Then who? Is it her, is that it? For not – god, why didn't she _believe_ me?"

"Maybe she did." He fixes you with one of those piercing looks. "But she would have had to weigh that against the life she could have in the wider world. I'm sure she didn't mean to hurt you."

"Then she shouldn't have fucking left," you mutter, unable to stop yourself swearing. Elijah doesn't acknowledge it, just makes a slight movement of his head.

"I'm sure she tried, Veronica. She wouldn't leave you without anything to remember her by."

And you remember the other week in the closet, and it all falls into place for you, just as Elijah knew it would. You realise what that meant. Why she was looking for you, what the aching care she took of you was meant to say.

"I didn't realise," you murmur, staring into the middle distance. "I didn't …"

"You weren't to know." Elijah lays a hand on his desk. He doesn't do touch – is not normally good with feelings – but you think this might be as close to it as he can get. "She's made her decision, Veronica. All that's left is to make yours."

You think about it. You look up at the man who would never run away and abandon you. The man who leaned on the Brotherhood bureaucracy until Christine was forcibly reassigned to the Circle of Steel, a committee so secret that she was guaranteed never to interfere with Elijah's protégé again.

"Yeah," you say, as the cracks spread through your heart like cobwebs. "I guess it is."

And Elijah's smile is the kindest thing you've ever seen.

* * *

He disappeared in the end, too. Like Christine. Like your parents. Like everyone else, when you walked away and they responded with a hit squad.

What you're saying is, there was a reason you yelled at Sixes when she came back after vanishing like that.

* * *

You run into Sixes just outside the door to the insane apartment, as she steps out of an elevator at the end of the hall. It's probably a good thing. You have no idea where it is you're planning to run off to.

"Everythin' all right?" she asks.

You nod and smile like nothing happened.

“Fixed the Sink,” you say, and she smiles back with unfeigned gratitude.

“Thanks, sweetheart,” she says. “Sure you’re okay, though?”

You shrug.

“Kinda weird in there,” you admit. "What's with the mug robot?"

Sixes raises an eyebrow, which you suspect means she knows exactly what bothered you in that apartment, but she's polite enough to play along.

"Rivalry between Dr 0 and Mr House," she says. "The good doctor decided the best revenge is a neurotic imitation. Men, eh?"

"Hah. Yeah."

Pause. The fluorescent lighting hums and pops overhead.

Sixes sighs.

"C'mon," she says. "I don't wanna be here either. Let's get movin'."

She punches a button and a second elevator dings into place alongside the first. Inside, it's cool and quiet. Air conditioning in the Mojave wasteland. Who'd have thought it?

It's also extremely slow. You stand there awkwardly for a while, fidgeting, and then finally it bursts out of you:

"Sixes, about Elij―"

"He left you a holotape," she says, the words springing from her with as much violence as yours. "I'm sorry, I … I just couldn't say."

"He – he what?"

"Was on my way out." She closes her eyes briefly, struck by a memory. "I found an old bunker in the wasteland a few miles west of the Madre. His base of operations while he prepared for his assault on the casino. And there, he … he'd recorded a tape. For you. Guess he didn't have anyone else in his life."

You're not really surprised. But somehow it hurts to hear it anyway.

"I – I see," you manage, forcing each word up through a throat that seems to be doing its level best to seal for good. "I … can I have it?"

Sixes gives you a sharp look.

"What kinda question is that? Course you can have it, it's yours. Some courier I'd be if I started stealin' my deliveries." She reaches inside her duster and pulls out a thin, streamlined tape. "Here. All yours."

You take it as if it were a baby bird, fragile and alien and stolen. It's very light. Almost feels like an insult that something so important can be so insubstantial. Maybe this is how Sixes felt about that chip.

"We can stop by one of the safer labs on the way if you want to play it," Sixes goes on. "There are plenty of workin' terminals here."

"Thanks," you say, still staring at the holotape. "I … I might need to just hang onto this for a little while. Until, uh … we get back. Maybe."

She nods like this makes sense. Hell, maybe it does.

"Sure thing, sweetheart," she says. "Whatever you want."

_Ding!_

The doors open, and the sudden rush of natural light finally makes you look up. The fresh air on your face clears your head: you blink hard, tuck the tape safely into your bag.

"Thanks," you say again. "I, uh, I really mean it."

"I know. And I'm sorry it took me so long."

"It's all right. I'm not sure I could've taken it when you first told me."

"Well, that's as may be." Sixes glances out of the elevator, down the little passage into the light. "Shall we?"

"Yeah."

Out you go, into the fierce, familiar light of the wasteland. Up ahead, some sort of radar tower looms out of a labyrinth of pipework and cement buildings; Sixes gives it a weird look and leads you off to the east, down what looks like it might once have been a road, a few remaining tiles half-buried in the dirt.

"This place is pretty compact," she says. "We can make the radar fence – that's the antennae round the edge – by dusk. Should be a pretty safe route. I've cleared it several times."

You nod, barely listening. Is it you, or is your bag heavier now? It can't be. The tape was so small. And yet it does feel weighty, just like Elijah's hand on your shoulder. You feel angry, all of a sudden; how dare he come back into your life, just when you had it sorted? And how dare he come back like _this?_ Who is he to demand that you take his last words, after everything he's―

"Hey," says Sixes. "I ever tell you how I killed Caesar?"

You fall heavily back into yourself, the sun and sweat hitting you all over again.

"What?"

"Caesar," she repeats. "Did I ever tell you how I killed him?"

You stare at her for a minute, wondering where the hell that came from, and then you see the light in her eyes and feel your lips begin to twitch.

"Only four hundred times," you say. "Why? You gonna give me the truth this time?"

"And nothin' but," she replies solemnly, as you make your way off the path and up a rocky slope. "See, I actually smuggled in a shot of turbo―"

"Bullshit," you interrupt, unable to resist. "You said before, the Legion took all your chems off you when they let you into the Fort."

"That's why I said 'smuggled', sweetheart." She crests the slope and turns around to offer you a hand up. "Had it made special by the fine boys and girls at Red Rock Canyon―"

"They're assholes."

"Funny you should say that! That's how I snuck it in. Finger-sized canister. Small fry, really. Had bigger."

"Thaaaat's something I absolutely didn't need to hear."

She clicks her tongue and aims a finger gun at you.

"Every day's a chance to learn somethin' new, sweetheart. Oh, watch your step, there's a junction box buried here and the lid's loose. So, I'm in the tent, facin' Caesar and all his biggest, meanest boys, and I clench real hard―"

You wince.

"Oh my god, Sixes―"

"―and the thing goes off in my ass. Well, you know me, sweetheart, I got more guts than brains, so that's the perfect place for it, and everythin' starts gettin' real slow, real fast. I give it a moment to hit me, then I grab a spear off the nearest guard and throw it right into Caesar's chest."

She pauses to let that one sink in. Around you, the ruins have given way to tumbled rocks and yet more of that omnipresent pipework, snaking in and out of the ground like maggots burrowing through old meat. Something happened here, maybe several somethings; the landscape looks like it's been torn up and thrown carelessly back together.

"I've never seen you throw a spear in my life," you say.

"Yeah, well, guns weren't invented yet when I was a kid, so my family had to make do. Anyway, it worked, didn't it? And there was just enough juice left in the turbo to get me outside before they started shootin'."

"There is no way in hell that that's true."

"Maybe, maybe not," says Sixes, taking out her cigarettes. "But you're laughin', though."

Are you? God, you are.

Imagine that. Here in the Big Empty, Elijah's last words burning a hole in your pocket, chasing an old flame to a place that hurt the most indestructible woman in the wasteland so bad she still can't even talk about it – and you're laughing.

You don't really know how that happened, but you are so goddamn glad it did.

* * *

The Empty is a breeding ground for monsters. You see them from a distance: nightstalkers prowling through the ruins to the north, the orange flash of cazador wings through the window of a long-shuttered commissary. You keep a cautious distance and listen in disbelief as Sixes tells you that this is where they come from, that the people in charge here don't even know they can breed, let alone that they've escaped.

"Why did they make them?" you ask, but she just shrugs.

"The guy was pretty vague on the details."

"Seriously? They just … did it? Like without a reason?"

"Better get used to that," she says. "Kinda the guidin' principle behind this whole place. Used to be a point to it all. But they lost their way a long, long time ago. Now they do awful shit just 'cause it's all they know."

That much you understand; it sounds uncomfortably like the Brotherhood, though if the nightstalkers are any indication, you suspect these people have probably done worse. And soon enough, you get your proof: some time later, as you near an old lab built into the side of a hill, three strange men stagger out from hiding places beneath the rusting walkway looping around its concrete flanks. Their heads are like Sixes', scarred and tattered, falling apart in between the straps and goggles holding them together; they wear ragged jumpsuits and clutch eerie axes with blades of blue light.

Is this what happened to― but that's a question for later. You flick the switch on your power fist and glance at Sixes, who nods curtly.

"They're already dead," she says. "Let's help 'em realise it."

You split up as the men shamble across the paving stones: Sixes to the right, you to the left. They falter for a moment, uncertain who to follow, but then the first bullet finds its mark, ripping an axe from its wielder's hand with a roar and the smell of cordite, and they turn as one towards Sixes and her pistol.

That's their mistake: never turn your back on the lady with the power fist. You lunge, hook your free hand into the back of one man's jumpsuit and drive your fist into the back of his neck with a crunch of metal on bone. He falls silently, breathlessly; one of his friends turns, eyes bulging between the mess of leather holding his broken face together, and lifts his axe―

―only to catch a bullet in the small of the back. He stumbles forward, the axe slipping from his hands, and you take the opportunity to finish him with an uppercut that leaves him sprawled in the dirt.

Just like old times. She sets 'em up, you knock 'em down. In the old days it was Legion, though, not … whatever these poor guys are.

The last one looks from you to Sixes and back again, clutching his ruined hand and moaning wordlessly. You glance at her, wanting to know whether this one's yours; she doesn't meet your eyes, just puts another round into the back of the man's head.

"Poor bastards," mutters Sixes, watching him crumple, blood trickling over his strapped-together skull. "Thanks, Veronica. Every time I think I've put all these guys outta their misery, I find a few more."

"Who are they?" you ask. "What happened to them?"

Her sunglasses make it impossible to tell whether she's looking at you, but right now you kind of hope she isn't. You're not sure which is the more worrying right now, the dead men at your feet or the live woman standing over them.

Sixes clicks the switch on her gun and the cylinder swings out with a motorised buzz for her to reload. Calm, steady movements. The only thing about this moment you recognise.

"Most everyone who arrives in the Empty gets picked up by the drones," she says. "They drag you back to the labs, then they cut your brain, heart and spine out. Replace 'em with machines. You're supposed to be able to move your body round by radio control, from the jar they put your brain in, but the operation don't work. Everyone ends up like these guys here."

Now she's definitely looking at you. But you just don't know what to say, not in the face of a cruelty as huge and senseless as that.

"Not me, though," Sixes goes on. "I got two scars in my head, courtesy of Benny. The auto-doc made a tiny adjustment to compensate, and, well." She shrugs. "Surgery worked. Let's leave it at that. It worked. Got all my organs put back in the end."

And she kept going. All of that, these violations, this un-fucking-believable nightmare of medical abuse – she took all of that, got back up, and kept on walking towards the fresh horrors of the Sierra Madre. All for some woman she'd never even met before. Whose name she didn't even know.

More than that. She did it for you.

You feel like you might be sick again. This is … this is not even remotely okay. Sixes has made a career, a goddamn life, out of doing impossible things for any random passer-by, but – they _stole her brain_. And she just kept going anyway, chasing someone else's ghost.

"Sixes," you murmur. "How – why didn't you just come home?"

She stares at you for a long moment. Her mouth has slipped open a little, like the question never occurred to her before and now it has she can't think of anything else.

"I don't," she begins, but just as quickly stops. "I can't quite say," she says, in a subdued sort of voice. "I guess I just didn't."

You stand there on either side of the corpses. Some distorted voice blares from a distant loudspeaker; far off, a pair of zopilotes beat their heavy wings, setting a course for the carrion you've made. But right here, where you are, there's nothing but your breath and a faint, warm wind.

You're so glad you can't see Sixes' eyes right now.

"I think we should bury these men," she says quietly.

"Okay," you reply.

But some silences are too deep to be broken, even by the bite of a shovel into hard, dry earth.

* * *

You work swiftly, with repurposed tools procured from the crates piled up around the outside of the ruin. You're strong, much stronger than Sixes, and you have more stamina, too, but she refuses to stop until the job is done. By the time the three men are below the earth, their stolen dignity restored, the sun is low in the sky and the light is fading fast.

"Getting late," you remark. The first words to pass between you since you agreed to bury the experiment victims.

"Yeah," says Sixes. Her voice gives nothing away.

"Stop here for the night?" you suggest. "We have shelter here."

"Here …?" She follows your gaze over to the ruined lab. "Ah. No, not here."

"Not one of the safe ones?"

"Oh, it's safe now. But it ain't a good place. Neither of us will get any sleep in there." She points past it, at one of those antennae that ring the crater. "We're forty minutes from the radar fence. We camp on the other side."

"Why?"

"Those guys with the busted heads can't cross it. Gotta be a livin' brain in a livin' body, otherwise it pushes you back in. 'S what's keepin' the Mojave safe from the scientists here."

So what are the scientists? Robobrains or something? You almost ask, but then you remember the three men you just killed and decide that maybe you don't want to know. Better just to get clear of this place.

The two of you climb the steps up onto the walkway around the edge of the lab, passing over another inexplicable pipe and back onto solid ground. Not a lot left; it's basically a straight shot across the scree to the radar fence from here, and in the end you find yourself passing through the shadow of the nearest antenna ten minutes ahead of Sixes' estimate.

"Down there," she says, pointing you towards an unremarkable rock formation jutting from the crater's lip. "Found a good spot when I last made this trip. Left some firewood and supplies."

You trust her opinion on this one; she's been walking the wasteland a hell of a lot longer than you. Soon enough, the two of you are set up in a neat little hollow in the leeward side of the rock and Sixes is coaxing a fire into life with her pump drill.

"You know, there's this handy little thing called a lighter …"

She doesn't rise to it, just keeps working on the flame with an engineer's patient hand. It makes you uneasy. Something about her silence isn't right.

"Hey," you say, sitting down and unhitching your power fist. "What's up?"

Sixes keeps her head down, feeding the fire with curls of kindling. Only when it's properly caught does she sit up and answer.

"Ugh," she mutters, settling back against the rock wall with a grimace. "Too old for this shit."

"You'd get bored sitting around in the Lucky 38," you remind her.

"Mm." Again, no joke. Something is most definitely up here. "Look, uh, I … didn't give you the whole story earlier."

Here we go. You lay your power fist down at your side, flicking nervously at the switches. It's a bad habit – fiddling with the pressure controls can damage the pneumatics – but you just can't help yourself.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah." She takes off her hat and sunglasses. Without them, she looks much older, much more tired. Or maybe it's just being here again. You can't imagine it's much fun, coming back to the place where you had your organs cut out and stitched back in. "That place we passed. Y-17. That's … that's where the med bots brought Christine, after Elijah attacked her. Up till then, she'd escaped the drones, 'cause she's smarter than me, but …"

Oh no. You weren't even thinking about her, for once – too shocked at the thought that Sixes got herself tortured just for you – but now that you are … god, what could have happened to her here? In a place where they pick brains like flowers?

"It was a place for medical testin'," Sixes says, her eyes clouding over. "Full of cages. They locked her up and cut her head up real bad. Stuck electrodes and shit in, it was … sweetheart, the things they did to her."

There's a coldness behind your eyes, welling up like tears and falling in thick, silent clumps down through your body. You want to say something. But your voice has gone off to that same distant place it vanished to after the defence of HELIOS One, and you can't muster a single damn word.

"That's where my friend comes in," Sixes goes on. "The one who gave me the tip. He sprung her, healed her up. We passed his hideout on the way here. And she did get better, I promise. But she's not … the same. Can't read or write no more." She tenses for a second, summoning her courage, and drags her gaze up from the fire to meet yours. "Didn't wanna say earlier," she says. "But I reckon it's part of why she ain't come back. She's hurt too bad to let go."

The fire spits and pops. Behind it, Sixes looks exhausted. Regretful. It doesn't suit her at all.

You wish you knew what to feel. You wish you knew what it was that Sixes is holding back, because you know that she is, that there's yet another shoe just waiting to drop. Most of all, though, you wish you could make her feel even a little bit better right now, the same way she made you laugh when your thoughts got stuck on Elijah.

You breathe in, fill your lungs with the taste of woodsmoke and dust.

"Thanks for telling me," you say.

Sixes twitches one corner of her mouth into something that superficially resembles a smile.

"You're allowed to be upset, you know," she says. "I shoulda told you sooner. Your girlfriend and all."

"She was." You shrug. Which, honestly, is you putting off the moment where you have to let your guard down and be genuine, but whatever. "I don't … really know what she is to me any more. But I know that you're my friend, and that something terrible happened to you. So I think it'd be kinda petty of me to be upset."

You've caught her off guard: her face shifts and the fake smile suddenly turns real.

"Aw," she says. "You tryin' to make an old woman cry?"

"I mean it," you say. "I have literally months to worry about Elijah and Christine. But you're right here. And, uh …" Don't make a joke. Don't make a joke. Don't make a― "Well, not to get all mushy on you, but at this point you've done a lot more for me than they have."

Well, shit. That was kind of a joke. But Sixes chuckles, thank god.

"Now you're definitely tryin' to make me cry."

"Okay," you sigh. "Excuse me for trying to be nice."

"Hey. Never said I didn't appreciate it. And," she adds, turning around and going through her stuff, "by way of a thank you, I'm gonna say you get to be the first person to hear this song I wrote the other week."

You have to laugh.

"You brought your _violin?_ "

"Yep." She turns around again, unsnapping the fastenings on her violin case. "Promised I'd play for Christine. You won't tell her I gave you a sneak preview, will you?"

"I mean, if she asks …"

"Good enough." She grins and swings her violin into place beneath her chin, plucking and tuning. "Mm … hm … okay. This here's a little ditty I call 'Holy Water'."

"Getting religious in your old age?" you ask, unable to stop a wry grin flickering across your face.

Sixes arches an eyebrow and sets her bow to the strings.

"Never say never, sweetheart. Now – one, two, three, four …"

Her voice rises up with the smoke and the stirring of the strings, deep and husky and cigarette-roughened. It's a song about walking, and growing older, and letting go, and the chorus curls under your ribs to get you right in the heart:

 _My friend's drinkin' whiskey, but I'll have holy water,  
_ _I'm a-hopin' to whiten my soul._  
_All I know is killin', but one day God willin'  
_ _I'll find me a place where I'm whole._

Sixes is a born performer, but you're willing to bet that even she can't tell if the wild, desperate longing in her voice is an act or not. You lean back against the rocks, letting the sound and feeling wash across your face, and a tension leaves your shoulders that you didn't even know was there until now.

There are storm clouds on the horizon: there will come a time for Elijah, when you play his tape, and there will come a time for Christine, when you reach the Madre. But right here and now, it's just you and your friend and the warm desert night, rich with music and that unplaceable smell that haunted you as a kid, and if Sixes has any booze on her you're damn well going to drink to that.


	3. still in the dark

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which you find yourself in need of a shovel.

There's a newcomer in the Villa. You come across it on your morning patrol, sprawled dead across the cobbles of the Puesta del Sol: a huge mutant vulture, the extra legs sprouting from its chest giving it the look of a mangy griffin.

Where did it come from? Nothing lives here except a few radroaches; there are the ghost people, but you can't truly say they're alive. More like preserved, pickled by the Cloud like the rest of the resort. But this thing – this is a real live animal, or at least it was before the Cloud got to it. Not one you've ever seen before, but still. Right now, you're the closest you've been to something living since Elijah's other victims left.

It must have come here by mistake. No bird sees the bloody fog blanketing the Sierra Madre and decides to fly in for a closer look. Maybe the winds blew it in. Maybe it's tame and it was following its master, though you feel sure you would have noticed if the Madre had any new guests; you know every inch of this place now, maybe better even than Dean did, and you'd recognise the marks of another person in an instant.

Without quite knowing why, you kneel at the vulture's side and put a hand on its shoulder. The feathers are rougher than they look, but if you work your fingers through them you can feel softer ones underneath.

Blood and phlegm crusted on its beak. Eyes bulging half out of its little skull. It died alone in here, lost and afraid in a toxic mist of airborne pollutants. Without even the ghosts for company.

You haven't cried in years – weren't sure you still could – but somehow this one dead bird makes your eyes sting in a way that has nothing to do with the Cloud.

* * *

This place is going to kill you. It's just a question of how long.

Won't be the ghost people, you're sure of that now. They're smarter than you first gave them credit for, and for the most part they've learned that crossing you is as close to a death sentence as their undying asses are capable of. Sometimes the brave ones test the membrane, come at you with their spears and bombs, but none push through.

No: it's going to be the air. Every second you're outside – and most of those you're indoors, too – you feel it clawing at you like a mouthful of cazadores. If you don't wrap up your arms and face before you sleep, you wake with lesions in your skin and blood under your fingernails from where you've scratched them raw in your sleep. What the Cloud is doing to your lungs, you have no idea, but you've developed a cough that keeps you up at night and you know it can't lead anywhere good.

It's okay. It's not okay, it's going to kill you, but it's okay. People like you were never built to last.

* * *

You put the bird over your shoulder, light as a lover's breath on your cheek, and press on through the Villa. You're not sure yet where you're going, but you know better than to stand still in the Sierra Madre. Keep moving, cautiously and unceasingly, and only stop when you get to one of your boltholes: the top floor of the casino, the ruined café, the old apartment you fortified with holograms. The ghosts fear you, but if you hesitate, if they realise that you're not some prowling force of nature but a tiny woman with unresolved cranial trauma and a body rotting from the inside out, they will turn on you in an instant.

Down silent streets, dim and red and mostly featureless, all the Art Deco flourishes barely visible through the Cloud. Tripwires and bear traps hidden around corners and behind pillars, but the trick is just to take it steady, to test each step before you take it.

Breathe slowly. Keep your mouth covered, pointless as it is. Stay clear of the cloudiest streets. The same trip you've made a thousand times before, but this time with the bird on your shoulder, hard and bony underneath its thick coat of feathers. You could take it to the Campanas del Sol. There's a mortuary there – tools, chemicals, ready access to the underground. Seems like as good a starting place as any. You'll figure things out from there.

A tell-tale flash of green behind a window: ghost person, goggles pulsing with light. You raise the holorifle and see it duck down again with a hiss and a long, rattling groan.

You let yourself smile. You may have burned your last chance to be loved, but at least you can be feared.

* * *

This place collects memories like the Brotherhood collect lasers. They shape your rounds as you pace the Villa, moving from clinic to police station to maintenance office to casino: here is where Dog saved your life, pulling a ghost trapper out of your face and breaking its arm off with a twist of his massive hand; here is where the four of you rested in an old apartment, utterly exhausted, while Wild Card cobbled together a meal from vending machine food and leaned on Dean till he made everyone something mind-altering that passed for martinis.

Here's the spot you return to most: the ruined café in the southern part of the Puesta del Sol, where the doors have held together just enough to keep the worst of the Cloud at bay. You cut through it, cradling the bird in your arms, and instantly you're coming back through the balcony doors with Wild Card, fresh from persuading Dean to stay in place for the launch of the Gala event.

"Get the," she begins, but you've already shut the door. You'd try to barricade it too, if you weren't concerned about how Dean might get down afterwards. One of you dies, the bombs chained to your necks will ensure the rest of you go down with them, and you are not going to let Elijah claim another victim, even a creep like Dean. (The irony is, you're going to kill him yourself tomorrow. But you don't know that yet.) "Thanks."

She sags against the wall, eyes closed. You have to wonder how she came here, and why; she's proved herself to be tough as a deathclaw matriarch, but she looks about two decades too old to have spent the last twenty-eight hours running and gunning. The lines of her face, the grey of her hair, all seem to have deepened since she first sprung you from your prison in the Villa clinic.

"Mind if we take a quick break?" she asks, half opening an eye to see your response. "Not long. Just gotta get my breath back."

You nod, and she smiles in thanks.

"All right," she says, and staggers downstairs to the café proper, leaning heavily on the railing. You stalk after her lightly, quickly, ready to turn and fire at the slightest sound of approaching ghosts. None materialise, and the two of you sink gratefully into seats at the least rotten table.

"Ah," sighs Wild Card, propping her bundle of scavenged spears against the wall. "Sorry about this, sweetheart. Guess I'm gettin' a little old for all this murder."

You smile, but her eyes are already closed again. You think about it for a second, then carry on smiling anyway. Wild Card's all right. You're not sure you can trust her yet, but she's all right.

A moment passes. The collar chafes at your wounded throat. And then, of all things, Wild Card starts to sing – a slow, sad song that sounds as tired as she is.

 _Across the wastes and in the canyons,  
_ _I make my livin' by my art  
_ _While I wander, lost and lonesome,  
Searchin' for my broken heart …_

It nails you to your seat like one of her spears. Music. The Madre is full of song, endless fucking Vera Keyes screeching from the speakers about beginning again and letting go – but nothing real, nothing that you could actually feel. Not like this.

 _Couldn't find her up in Goodsprings  
_ _In Nipton she gave me the slip  
_ _They said she just checked out in Novac  
_ _So I'm headin' for the Strip …_

Wild Card keeps singing – wandering all over the Mojave, looking for her lost love in Boulder City, in Primm, even braving Searchlight and Cottonwood. It's a simple song. But in this hell, where the air is as thick and red as blood and the streets are thick with ghosts – Christ, it might just be the best gift you've ever received.

There's a thought. Which of you is this break really for?

"… on the walls at Hoover Dam."

She opens her eyes, smiles a lazy sort of smile that makes even your blackened heart flutter.

"Feel better already," she says. "How 'bout you?"

But all you can do is stare.

* * *

The ghost people are in the mortuary again. You put the bird down in the doorway and fire once, twice, clusters of blue pixels skittering from the barrel and eating holes in the ghosts' limbs. Won't stop them – even if you decapitate them, they keep breathing, and you suspect that after their friends drag them away they somehow reconstitute themselves – but they know from experience that if you keep firing, this gun will devour whole limbs, and they back off fast, hurling a spear or two for the sake of appearances and retreating deeper into the Villa buildings.

Wild Card would have hurled the spears back. Elijah left her the holorifle when she turned up, since she went through the front door and had her gear stripped off her by the security systems, but she passed it on as soon as she met you. You're Brotherhood, you have the energy weapons, she said. I'm fine with just a pointy stick.

You grimace. Sometimes you feel like all the holes the robots cut in your head have thinned the barrier between you and the world around you, opened up a path for all the memories in the Madre to bleed into your skull. The scribe in you says that's superstitious nonsense, but then, you aren't a scribe any more, and this is not a place that one can survive without some measure of faith.

Enough. You lay the bird gently on a table and start searching for a shovel. There's a patch of dirt in one of the nearby courtyards that might once have been a flowerbed, back before the war, but the earth is rock solid. If you want to put this poor creature underground, you're going to need tools.

* * *

You've buried a lot of things. When you were a kid, you buried your feelings, because good Brotherhood girls don't feel that way about other girls; when Veronica exhumed them, you welcomed them back with open arms, and then Elijah called you into his office and told you that you had a choice between letting Veronica go and tearing her life to pieces, and so you buried them all over again.

Drive the shovel into the dirt. Pull out the earth, set it aside. It's hard work, but you're its equal.

You buried Veronica too, leaving her in the bunker at Lost Hills while you were reassigned to the Circle of Steel. The people you met there were the hardest of hardliners, steadfast believers in the most rigid interpretation of the Brotherhood's Codex. You would not have survived your training if you hadn't buried a little more of yourself – your doubts, your questions, the rebellious fire that Veronica lit in your heart. You buried bullets in targets, knives in training dummies. You buried opponents in chokeholds in the sparring ring.

Again. Shovel in, dirt out. The hole grows deeper; the pile of dirt, taller.

You buried a high-ranking scribe who tried to defect to the Followers, tracking her down to the Boneyard and luring her into the sights of your rifle with a forged note and a couple of bribes. It was easy. She knew the Circle would send someone, but she just wasn't smart enough.

Again. The hole is about the right size now, but you want to make sure it's too deep for the ghosts to dig the bird up again. You don't know if they'd eat it, if they even can eat through those gas masks, or if their interest only goes as far as killing. You're sure you don't want to find out.

When they gave you the mission to kill Elijah, you buried everything you had left in your hate. There wasn't much to lose. He'd already buried you so deep, so far from Veronica, in a part of the Brotherhood from which there is no retirement but death. You buried your past when you set out, your gun at Little Yangtze, your armour and your literacy at Y-17, your voice in the Sierra Madre clinic. By the time Wild Card found you, there wasn't much of you left to free.

You put the bird in the hole and kneel there for a moment, trying to summon something – a feeling, maybe, a sense of occasion. This will probably be the last thing you ever bury. Wild Card already buried Elijah for you, locking him away in the vault beneath your feet; you would have liked to kill him, but you appreciate the vicious artistry of her revenge, of trapping him down there forever with all the secrets he spent his miserable life lusting after.

And of course, you've already buried yourself. Here in the Sierra Madre, all wrapped up in a blood-red funeral shroud.

You tell yourself that this is what the Brotherhood is all about, keeping watch over old world tech to prevent the apocalypse from ever happening again. And maybe you're right, maybe that's what this is.

But you don't really believe that, do you.

* * *

_Blam_ ―

What the fuck?

You're up in an instant, gun at the ready, and see a ghost person swaying behind you, a bear trap gauntlet slipping from its smashed hand―

 _Blam_ ― and the left lens of the ghost's gas mask erupts in a spray of green fluid and broken glass. You waste no time, drive your elbow into its gut and pump holorifle blasts into its flailing body as it falls, two quick shots that burn a leg away in a wash of hungry photons and leave it twitching feebly on the stones.

That leaves you two more shots for whoever else is shooting. You scan the shadows around the courtyard, manoeuvring backwards into cover in the mortuary doorway, and you see …

It can't be.

"Christine," she breathes. So quietly you can't even hear her, but you know the movement of those lips, have spent long nights in your quarters at the Circle barracks tracing them with your mind's eye, and you don't need to hear to see your name upon them.

It is.

She looks so much older than you remember. In your mind, you still see a girl, hovering on the threshold of adulthood, but the person before you is definitely a woman. Her face is a little leaner; her eyes, a lot wiser.

She looks afraid, too. You wonder what Wild Card told her, though you suspect that nothing could have prepared her for seeing you here, like this, with a road map carved into your skull and weeping sores on your arms.

Wild Card. She's there as well, standing alongside her with a smoking gun in her hand and a serious expression on her face. You didn't really believe her when she said that she'd be back. Couldn't fathom why someone would do that to themself. But here she is, right back in the husk of your life.

This isn't fair. You were finally done: it was all settled, all finished, Elijah sealed away and your mission fulfilled. This was your way out. A quiet exit out here in the Madre, where no one would ever be fool enough to find you. But no, Wild Card decides to do the fucking impossible and come back with―

Veronica takes a step forward. Without even thinking, you raise your rifle; she freezes, her eyes wide with shock, and suddenly you realise what you're doing and it's all you can do not to throw the gun to the floor with the wounded ghost. You can't take it. You can't breathe. You are going to die here, one way or another, and Veronica has found you, and you are going to die here, and the bird suffocated alone, and you are going to die here, and Wild Card kept her promise, and you are going to die because you can't breathe and your chest is going to burst and now you're running somehow, somewhere, through the mortuary and down into the tunnels, running and running through the Möbius strip of the Sierra Madre, as far away as you can from the women outside and the unbearable promise that tomorrow the sun might rise again.

* * *

You crash through the door of your bolthole in the residential district with spent microfusion cells falling at your feet and a trail of horizontal ghost people behind you. Your body works without any input from your brain, closing the door and punching the button to turn on the holograms outside, and leaves you slumped in a chair for someone else to sort out.

The gunshots in your chest begin to slow. Your breaths feel a little less like tearing leather. And little by little, you feel yourself returning.

What kind of knight are you? You live in the _Sierra Madre_ , fighting deathless ghosts, militarised holograms and the inevitable decay of your own body – and you run because, what, your friend kept her promise? Because you saw your old sweetheart again? Yeah, that sort of thing goes down so well in the Circle.

You breathe out, straighten up. It's fine. You're not a knight any more; your mission is complete. You can be a failure if that's what you have to be.

It's not what you want to be, though. When you had that conversation by the fountain, right before Wild Card walked out to collect her gear and go home, she told you that you had an obligation to Veronica. And she's right, really. You lied to her, you abandoned her, and then you turned down your chance at making it right: that's a hell of a debt you've run up.

And that's not even mentioning what you owe to Wild Card. She was kind to you, and you drank her kindness greedily, and then she offered you salvation and you slapped her hand away so hard you think you might have broken it.

You should go back out there. Find them. Apologise for pointing a gun at them, for running off, for their wasted journey. It would mean revealing your mutilated voice to Veronica, but you assume Wild Card already told her. You should explain yourself and finish burying your bird.

You don't do any of that. You sit right here in this tattered armchair, clutching your gun and staring at the flickering light of your makeshift lamp, and hope that all of this will be over soon.

* * *

If only it were that easy. You can tell what's coming long before it arrives; Wild Card's good, but not good enough to break into this apartment undetected, and you hear her moving over the roof for some time before her hand snakes down and raps on your window.

Trust her to find your emergency exit. It's the one flaw in your security: the ghost people don't climb well in their bulky hazmat suits, and you figured nobody else knew the Villa well enough to find their way up to the roof of this building. Or at least, nobody who would ever come back here again.

You'll have to do something. Ignore her and she'll invite herself in; shoot her and you'll have done something even she won't forgive.

You get up and put the holorifle down on the table. It takes a little effort to make yourself let go of it, but you manage it in the end. You stand up straight, like a real live human being, and you go over and open the shutters.

"Finally."

Wild Card lowers herself down from the edge of the roof and swings stiffly in through the window. It's kind of impressive really; she looks old enough to be your mother, and you can't imagine any of the Brotherhood elders clambering around with half her agility.

"Jesus," she says, settling onto her heels with a grunt. "Those holograms are just as mean as I remember."

You don't react. You really don't know how you would, if you even could.

At least it's her that came. If it had been Veronica, you'd never have made it out of your chair, let alone over to the window.

Wild Card looks at you for a moment, maybe expecting a response, maybe just tallying up all the ways in which you've changed since the two of you parted company. Then she sighs and pats you roughly on the shoulder.

"Let's sit down, eh?"

She shrugs off her duster, doffs her hat and slings both casually over the back of a chair as if she owns the place. It's strange to see her like this, dressed to wander the desert; in your mind's eye, she's still wearing that Yangtze jumpsuit, with the Madre security armour strapped over it and a day's stubble greying her jaw. You did think about what her normal life might look like, but you didn't really have much to go on, other than that she's part of some council working to unify the settlements of the Mojave.

"C'mon," she says, dropping onto the couch and patting the seat beside her. "Might as well play nice, 'cause I ain't goin' anywhere. 'S a physical impossibility. No way I'm draggin' my bony old ass back up the way I came."

You hesitate, then sit.

"That's it," she says, leaning back against the ratty cushions and looking around. "Nice place you got here. All mod cons, as they say on the Strip."

She waves a hand, taking in the workbench, stove, lights. The little comforts you wrested from the Madre's forbidding grip. It wasn't easy; after Y-17, you can't code any more, and you definitely can't hack the Villa terminals. But you can still build a circuit, and you had a lot of time to experiment.

"'S about what I expected. If Dean could figure it out, then I knew you could. The hologram bouncers are real impressive, though. You know me, I don't know shit about computers." She clicks her tongue. "Someone tried to give me a Pip-Boy once and I had to tell him, doc, I ain't even sure how to turn this thing on."

You keep your silence. Now that she's here, showing up your living death with her exuberant vitality, it's all too much, and your heart is firing blanks in your chest again. You wouldn't be surprised if you never managed another word for the rest of your life.

"Smoke?" You shake your head. "Mind if I do?" You shake it again; Wild Card smiles and lights up. "Ah," she says, taking a deep drag and blowing it conscientiously away from your face. "I know, I know, I really shouldn't, but I already gave up chems. Gotta have one vice left. Although if I'm bein' honest, I still got half a tin of mentats in my bag." She fires off a quick sidelong glance at you, mouth curling into a wry grin. "I won't tell Veronica if you don't."

You don't smile back. She raises an eyebrow and lets the grin fade.

"Okay," she says. "Enough scratchin' around. Did I ever tell you about this?"

She gestures at her tattoo sleeve. You've seen it before, of course: a pack of cards, beginning with a pair of sixes on her shoulder and tumbling down her left arm into the flames licking up from her wrist. You thought she just liked gambling – she kept using those card game metaphors – but maybe there's more to it.

Weird. But you'll give her the benefit of the doubt: you owe her that much, and more than that.

"I'll take that as a no," she says, which is a little awkward; you actually meant to reply this time, just got stuck in your thoughts by mistake. "Well, anyway, it's the story of my life." She taps the sixes: hearts and spades, like mirror images of each other. "These two are where I started – one for me, one for the man I could've been. This here, the king of diamonds – that's when I met Mr House. King of clubs is killin' Caesar, that's why it's torn in half." (Did she just say she killed …?) "Oh, and these …"

She turns her hand over to show you a set of cards that wasn't there before, fanned out on the inside of her wrist where the flames don't reach: black aces and eights, a queen of clubs.

"Dead man's hand," she says. "That's the Madre. And the Empty too, I guess."

You feel the weight of it in her voice, see it in the red Cloud stains tattooed on the cards. This is what binds the two of you: the holes in your heads, the memory of bomb collars around your necks. The wiring in your skulls. The clenching of your guts when you hear piped music and expect beeping from your throat.

The knowledge that Wild Card took on all of it willingly, just to get the chance to speak to you.

You raise your eyes to hers: dark, serious, full of pain. But only for a second, before whatever barrier she just lowered flicks back into place.

"Anyway, the one I wanted to talk about is this." Wild Card's hand moves up her arm, past the flames and scorched cards, and taps a joker on her bicep, near her elbow. A tattooed bullet hole punching out its face. "This unfortunate fella is Benny Gecko. He shot me in the head."

The scars. There are two that you knew couldn't be from the surgery, two ragged masses of tight flesh like pale stars against her dark forehead.

You're a little surprised, but honestly, you'd be more shocked if this Benny guy had actually managed to kill her.

"He also stole a package I was meant to be deliverin'," says Wild Card, exhaling another cloud of smoke. "I was a courier. Mojave Express. Neither snow nor rain nor giant fuck-off scorpions, though I gotta admit, not all of that was relevant in the desert. Once I'd recovered, got myself outta the grave Benny buried me in and back on my feet, I tracked him down. Primm, Nipton, Novac, Boulder City, Freeside, the Strip." Like the song she sang. Maybe it isn't about a lover after all. Or maybe a song can be about more than one thing at a time. "Took me months to find him, to cheat my way onto the Strip, into his casino. Solved a lot of problems along the way. Turned the Mojave into a puzzle box and shook it till Benny fell out."

She grins to herself. It's not a nice grin. It might be the least nice grin you have ever seen.

"I'm not very smart," she says. "Not all that tough, either. But I don't know how to give up, and I'm real good at talkin', so when I found him, I talked and I talked and I talked. Talked him into goin' up to his suite, into tellin' me his plan. Why he'd shot me, what he wanted with the package. Kept him talkin' for hours, pretendin' I was fool enough to think he might give me a job, like he wasn't gonna kill me all over again first chance he got. Then …" She makes a finger gun, fires it at your lamp with a click of her tongue. "I got close enough, and he got sloppy enough. I slipped the gun he'd shot me with outta his jacket and repaid the favour."

She seems to be somewhere very far away – back in that casino, maybe. But she pulls herself back to the Sierra Madre with startling ease.

"I think you know what happened next," she tells you. "For a long time, I'd been the courier who was gonna kill Benny and get my package back. And then suddenly I'd done that. And I just …" She shakes her head. "It was like I'd died," she says. "Everythin' I was, it ended when I pulled the trigger on that bastard. And all the pain I was holdin' back, the headaches and the taste of the grave in my mouth … well, I couldn't really laugh it off any more."

You can feel a chill seeping into your bones, even here in the sickly heat that builds up beneath the Cloud. Apparently you share more than you thought. More than what you found in the Big Empty and the Sierra Madre, anyway.

"I nearly didn't make it outta that suite," she says. "And I only chased Benny for a few months. You chased Elijah your whole life, near enough. No wonder you didn't make it outta the Madre." She sighs and bends to grind out her cigarette on the sole of her boot. "I'm sorry, sweetheart. I shoulda said before, 'cause I could see it in you when we was gettin' ready to trap Elijah. The way you talked, like there was nothin' else left except your mission. Just like me."

A long, sharp look. That barrier is gone again: there's the darkness, the sorrow. Like looking in a mirror.

You weren't aware you had much of a heart left to break. And yet.

"The Madre got to me, I guess," says Wild Card. "I had to let go, like the poor dead lady said, or else I'd have died here. But I won't let that stand, Christine. 'Cause waitin' outside, there's a brilliant young woman who wants nothin' more than to know you again, and I promise you, sweetheart, that no matter what this misson's done to you, you still got a future." She reaches over and takes your hand. Just like she did when you parted ways before the Gala event and she swore she'd be back for you. "Even if we have to rip it right outta Elijah's wrinkly old hands."

You stare at her for ten whole endless seconds, but you can't see anything in her face at all but the fierce flame of her belief.

Could she be …?

A soft little noise breaks painfully from your throat. Something long-dead inside you wakes up and leans into it, throws its weight against it with all the fury of its desperation, and you cough, and in your ruined voice you say:

"You think so?"

It's the first you've spoken since she and Elijah's other victims left; you barely even sound like Vera Keyes any more, let alone yourself, your throat all Cloud-scorched and rusty from disuse. But Wild Card's only reaction is to grip your hand a little tighter.

"Ain't no use in thinkin' it," she says. "I _know_ it, sweetheart."

There's so much you want to say, but you don't know what any of it is. You squeeze her hand back and feel a stinging in your eyes like when you saw the poor dead vulture and knew you were looking at your future.

"Aw, it's okay," she says kindly, sensing your intentions from the strength of your grip. "And you will be too. Promise."

She might be right. Look how strongly she believes. She rode that faith all the way across the wasteland to the Madre, to her showdown with Elijah and to this room here: isn't that something you could put your wounded trust in?

"Did you really kill Caesar?" you ask, hoping Wild Card knows what you mean, and she chuckles.

"Yeah," she says, her voice light again. "He had a broken howitzer, wanted a new firin' mechanism for it. I delivered it with a generous wad of plastic explosive inside. Hit the detonator on my way outta his camp and painted half the Fort a unique little colour I like to call fascist-guts red."

There's no way that's true. But that's not really the point, is it; the point is that your face is moving again like it hasn't done in ages, your lips trembling, your eyelids doing their best to hold back the titanic force slowly juddering into life behind them.

You won't cry. You don't even know how, no matter what your face has to say about it.

"What … happens now?" you ask weakly.

"Well," says Wild Card, "I was thinkin' we should clean and dress them sores, maybe get you a drink. Then I reckon I oughta make myself scarce and let you and Veronica have a chat. She's been real patient, waitin' out there, but I don't think we should leave her hangin' much longer. How does that sound?"

You push through the incipient tears, just about manage a smile.

"I think … I think that sounds good."

Wild Card's smile cuts through the red air like the beam of a lighthouse.

"My kinda girl," she says, pulling a bottle from her pack. "Now, this stuff's gonna sting like a motherfucker on your arms, so I hope you're feelin' brave."

You aren't. You were, once, but you wandered over the line into carelessness a long time ago.

You stretch out your arms anyway.

* * *

You're cleaner now. Arms bandaged, face washed of dirt and Cloud residue. Wild Card even lent you her razor so you could shave your head again, sort out the wild ragged mess your hair's grown into since you stopped bothering. This is about as ready as you could possibly be, and it still isn't anywhere near enough.

You can't sit down, can't stand still. She's out there. Wild Card is probably talking to her right now, telling her all about how she should be gentle and patient with you because you've been through a lot. And so at any moment, there's going to be a knock at the door and then she'll actually be―

Five knocks. Shave and a haircut, same as ever.

You hover for a moment, your hands trembling, and then you force yourself to open the door. And there she is: Veronica Santangelo, standing in the hallway in a dusty old coat and hood.

She smiles uncertainly at you.

"Hey," she says, with a little wave of her hand.

You stare. She's so much more beautiful than you remember; she was pretty as a girl, but she's grown into herself now, wears her face as a woman.

That makes one of you at least.

"Ronnie?" you murmur, digging deep and finding your voice, and hear Veronica's breath catch.

"Chris," she says, taking a step forward. "Chris, I …"

Her voice is too choked to continue, but by then it doesn't matter: you're already in each other's arms, the warmth of her so startlingly close that you feel it might burn you away to ash, and as you cling to her like a rope tossed over a cliff edge the pressure behind your face surges forward and finally, after thirteen long desolate years, you cry.

She's crying too, you think. There's so much to weep for: the years you've lost, the things that have been done to you and that you've done to yourselves. But there are so many more years yet to come, for Wild Card to make good on her promise, and strange as it may seem, some of these tears might just be tears of hope.

* * *

You thought it was over. That there could be no going back. That the two of you had clicked as rebellious teenagers and that the years since would have crunched you down into adults with nothing to say to one another.

You couldn't be more glad to be proven wrong.

Veronica doesn't ask a single thing about what happened to you, for which you are more grateful than you could ever possibly say; instead, she tells you about all the things she's done. How she went east with Elijah and helped found a new Brotherhood chapter, how that chapter burned and Elijah fled, leaving it rudderless and dying. How she and Wild Card solved all its problems but couldn't convince its members to change course, how she finally decided to leave, how they sent a hit squad after her because they thought she might defect to the Followers. (Your blood runs cold with the memory of the ex-scribe you killed in the Boneyard: that could have been Veronica whose skull you put a bullet in.) How now she really is a Follower, using her knowledge and training to help the communities of the Mojave, and the Brotherhood are much too afraid of Wild Card and her significant stockpile of EMP weaponry to dare come after her again.

You don't have any right to be, not any more, but you're so proud of her you think your heart is going to pop.

"You were right, you know," she says, a little sadness in her voice. "I should've left a long time ago."

You bow your head, crushed by the weight of the history you didn't share.

"We should both have left," you say. She's so good. Hasn't said a word about your new voice. "When we had the chance."

Maybe there's something wrong with how you said it. Veronica's brows knit and she reaches out to pull you over along the couch, settling your head against her shoulder. Part of you wants to withdraw, but you physically can't; the instant she put her arms around you in the doorway, you felt every muscle in your body give in simultaneously. Veronica could literally pick you up and carry you away and you wouldn't be able to do a thing about it.

"Yeah," she says, nestling her arm comfortably around your side. "But we're here now."

Yes. You're here. And who's to say that this will work if you transplant it anywhere else? Veronica isn't the girl you left behind: she's a grown adult, standing astride a life and career in which you don't feature at all. And you – you're definitely not the girl she left behind, either; you're a contract killer, a revenge murderer, a brain-damaged scribe who can't even write her own name. Who sees the burning white flashes of the electrodes every time she closes her eyes and her own blood on the pillow when she opens them again.

"We're not the same," you say. It's as close as you can get to the thoughts echoing off the walls of your skull like the screams in the Empty.

Veronica sighs and tilts her head forward, pressing her lips against the top of your head and instantly stopping your heart.

"No, we're not," she says, as you try to catch your breath. "We're gonna have to get to know each other all over again. But I'll give it a shot if you will."

And will you? You've been avoiding this question ever since you saw her across the courtyard. Will you? Can you? _Dare_ you?

You breathe in, and out. You sit up, moving Veronica's arm from around your back. You take hold of her hand.

It's the hardest decision you've ever made, but you tell her the truth.

* * *

Elijah thought the Sierra Madre was the answer. Truth is, it's a question. Wild Card figured it out; that's why she left without you. God worked it out too, and Dog, and even Dean, though he didn't get long to enjoy it before you put him down.

Now, standing outside the mortuary again, you feel you may have an answer of your own.

"Want any help with that?" asks Wild Card, leaning against a nearby wall. Veronica calls her Sixes, but you don't think that's her real name; it's probably because of that tattoo.

You shake your head, and she nods in understanding.

"I getcha," she says. "Go on, then. I'll keep watch."

She draws her pistol – some kind of heavily modified 5.56mm, a far cry from the spears you're used to seeing in her hands – and turns her attention to the doorways and alleys. Veronica meets your eye for a moment, then nods and joins her, power fist hissing into life on her arm. It seems she still loves punching, even now. One thing at least that hasn't changed.

You look down at your vulture, still lying undisturbed in its grave. The ghost people haven't touched it, for which you are more grateful than you know how to explain. It's still here. Much like you.

Time to finish this. You undo your work, packing the dirt back into the grave, and handful by handful the bird disappears.

It kind of breaks your heart. But it's the first thing you've done in a long time that you're sure is the right thing to do.

On the last scoop of the shovel you freeze up, every muscle in your body collapsing to dust in an instant; you stand there for a long moment, helpless and hating yourself for it, until someone eases the shovel from your grip and you just manage to shift your head to one side enough to see Veronica next to you.

She puts a hand on your arm, eases you back a step, and pats the last shovelful of dirt into place.

It's done. It hurts about as much as it helps, but … it's done.

"Should we say a few words?" asks Wild Card, joining the two of you by the grave.

"Yeah." You pause. "I don't know. It's stu―"

"It ain't stupid. It's life." She clears her throat. "We're gathered here to bury …" Glance at you, but you shake your head; the bird has no name. "… this zopilote," she continues, smooth as ever. "It died here in the Sierra Madre, where no livin' thing should ever come. We mark its passin' 'cause no one else will, and 'cause there's nothin' so small that it ain't deservin' of respect."

She lowers her head. You do too, and Veronica next to you. It's risky – this is exactly how you got jumped earlier – but some things are worth taking chances for.

A long moment passes. The Villa creaks and breathes around you. When was the last time you stood shoulder to shoulder with people like this? Your first tour of this place, you guess. Maybe that moment at the fountain, when Wild Card brought you back to meet Dean and God. (You didn't meet Dog for a while afterwards; God fronted most of the time, unwilling to cede control except to hide himself from Elijah.) You stood there with them and stared at Elijah's face writ large in the glowing light of the hologram as he gave you your instructions, and then you stayed standing and staring as he disappeared and Wild Card took his place.

I know this seems insane, she said. And that's 'cause it is. Casinos like this, the house always has the advantage. But take a look around you. We got insider knowledge, a Brotherhood knight, a _nightkin_. That's a hell of a hand. We just gotta play it right.

I wonder where that leaves you, replied God suspiciously. What part do you play, human?

And she grinned like that was her favourite question in the world.

I'm your wild card, she said. And I promise you, fellas, I'm gonna get every last one of us out of here in one piece.

You remember the way she looked. Confident. Dazzling. Like a con artist at the moment her mark signs away his life savings.

You didn't trust her at all. But something about her made you think that maybe she could do it.

Breathe out, raise your head: the moment's past. She kept her word after all. And you've kept yours, too. The bird – the zopilote – has been laid to rest.

"All right," you say. "All right, I … it's done."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah, Ronnie." The nickname tastes weird in your mouth, like you no longer have the right, but calling her Veronica seems like admitting defeat before you've even started. "It's buried."

You are going to have to dig it up later. And Elijah, and the scribe you shot, and every other thing you've buried, until you manage to exhume the girl you used to be. It's going to be slow; it's going to hurt like hell. But it's probably your only chance at finding the woman you might have been, and if you don't do that then the Madre will kill you even if you leave.

Veronica reaches for your hand. You hesitate, then let her take it.

"Let's go home, Chris," she says.

You meet her eyes, sharp and bright with something you once had a name for.

"Okay," you say, the tension finally leaving your jaw. "Let's go home."


	4. roll me through the gates of hell

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which you wring blood from a stone.

She's back. And this time, she's brought an army.

You suppose you expected this, really. She's got lives in her, crowded thick like grains of Mojave sand. If the Divide couldn't winnow them from her, you doubt that the Empty or the Madre could do it, either.

You're going to have to answer for everything now. That's fine. A man like you, what you might call a historian – he keeps his answers close to hand. You'll stand by what you've done.

For now, though, you need to make ready. If she's coming, she's coming for you, and you're not fool enough to take that lightly. You lower your binoculars, watching her caravan of wastelanders and police robots dwindle into dark flecks and clouds of dust, and turn to the west. They're mounted, but you know this terrain better than anyone. You should be back at your post long before they reach Hopeville.

Back, and ready to give Courier Six the welcome she deserves.

* * *

There are no safe routes, not in the Divide. Only less dangerous ones. The courier killed many, many marked men on her journey to the missile silo, and an entire hive of tunnellers, but even thinned by her impossible hand, the threats of the Divide are not to be underestimated. Radiation. Deathclaws. Other things that had no name before you found them.

But you – you are a courier, even now. It's in your nature to find the roads, to wear a path into the wasteland with the back and forth of boots and parcels. You walk the hidden ways, skirting the Courier's Mile and the ruined barracks of the Hopeville military base. The marked men are starting to move back in, but you keep your distance, pick off stragglers with staff and submachine gun. (Mercy killings. Their bare life is hardly life at all.)

You steal through the collapsed overpass – silent and empty now; the tunnellers haven't dared return here since the courier turned it into a grave for twenty-four of their best – and out onto the High Road, where the old world yawns at your feet. Ancient highway like a bridge to heaven, stretching up over miles and miles of devastated city blocks and prowling deathclaws.

Right at the top. That's the place, where old buildings have slipped to form an uneven archway that vaults the High Road like the triumphal arch Caesar raised over the gates of Phoenix. A hundred feet above the highway, itself a hundred up: from the hideaway at the top, you can see clear to the hazy end of the world. The great grey body of America, staked out in the sun like a runaway slave on a cross.

You watched the courier from here once, keeping tabs on her as she walked the Divide. You remember seeing her emerging from the tunnel, breathing hard, fumbling bullets back into her gun and muttering to that machine of hers. After your conversation – you brought a machine of your own, a device to broadcast to the courier's robot – you watched her find the camp of the marked men that once stood in the shadow of this crow's nest. Four hardened soldiers with heavy weapons, guns meant to take down power armour and deathclaws, and she killed them all in minutes. Five bullets, three blasts from the machine's laser, one grenade improvised from a microfusion cell. Their healing powers did nothing to save them.

You knew then that if she made it to the end of the Divide and chose to fight, you wouldn't be able to kill her. Not that it mattered. You would gladly have died for your cause. You almost did.

Cast it aside; that story's done. All played out, right down to the flags. Now all that's left is to sit up here in the window and keep your binoculars trained on the tunnel mouth. Watching. Waiting for your reckoning to arrive.

* * *

There. Riding up the High Road out of the tunnel mouth on the back of a hardy-looking grey, thickset and overmuscled like all its mutant breed. You've never seen her on horseback before, but she rides well, as she does everything well.

She's alone. Expecting you, probably. This is one of the places where you find her, on those occasions she makes the pilgrimage northwest to the nation she killed. Couriers should meet on the roads they make; these things matter to you.

Her head moves swiftly, taking in ground and sky, cataloguing potential threats. Fighter's instinct. One of the reasons you thought she was a Legion spy at first; she moves like an easterner, with feeling for the terrain. You make no attempt to conceal yourself, and a moment later she raises a hand in greeting, urging her horse on towards you.

Breathe in. And out. The hate comes, but you are its master now, and you can let it go again. Courier Six is dangerous, careless, a firebrand too dazzled by her own brilliance to notice the trail of burned things she leaves in her wake – but there's something salvageable in her, some potential for life as well as death.

If there wasn't, you wouldn't be trying to kill her.

"Must be somethin' in the water," she says, climbing up the wreckage to your perch. "These days it seems like everyone makes me clamber round the rooftops like a Dayglow bat before they'll talk to me."

You're already tired, listening to her. If you live to be her age, you imagine yourself burnt out, a cindered husk of a man with old stories swirling around your hollow insides, but she seems to get more and more dynamic with every passing year. As if, like Lanius, she grows to fit the story of herself.

"You're back," you say. "Come home again."

"Sure, sure." She steps lightly across a spar of crumbling concrete, ignoring the hundred-foot drop on either side, and sits down heavily at your side. The campsite up here is small – a few long-emptied crates, a bedroll, a dormant fire – but there's room for two, if you're careful. "Oof. Too old for this shit." She reaches for her canteen, takes the measured drink of a woman used to desert travel. "Ah. Better. Okay, how you doin', Ulysses?"

You shake your head.

"Not my question to answer," you reply. "I should be the one asking you."

Short bark of laughter.

"So you did know," she says, grinning her sharp, unpleasant grin. "Course you did. Why would you not, huh?"

She takes off her hat. Her hair wasn't long, last you saw her, but now it's gone altogether, replaced by a network of pale lines scored into her scalp.

They caught her, then. You had considered the possibility, though in your heart you felt sure that she of all people would be able to evade them. They caught her, and somehow she escaped again.

Her grin broadens at the look in your eyes.

"Take more than a bunch of old world ghosts to put me down," she tells you, replacing her hat. "They work for me now. Put those minds of theirs to good use. And I – I kept goin', just like I'm sure you meant me to."

You nod slowly, trying to decide if you're shocked. In the end, you decide not: it's what she does, isn't it? Can't bear to be bested. Anyone who tries to cage her ends up under her heel. Caesar learned that the hard way – and House, and Oliver, and Benny. Countless others too small for history to take note.

"And what did you find there?"

She gives you a hard look that suggests your question might have crossed a line.

"Christine," she says. "I found Christine. She's … safe now. Be along soon, in fact." She waves a hand at the tunnel mouth, far below. "Doesn't know you're here. I figured I could surprise her."

"You assume I have anything to say to her."

She snorts.

"Give it a rest, Ulysses. You know what she's like about debts. Let the poor girl have her moment."

Throwing your tapes back at you, just like before. You sigh and turn away, returning your attention to the High Road and the shattered city below. Time to change the subject.

"Not sure why she's here at all," you tell her. "You always came alone. Now you've returned with an army."

"Oh. Yeah, that." She clicks her tongue. "Well, you told me the tunnellers were comin' to the Mojave, so I'm here to make sure they don't. You must've noticed, they run away when you hurt 'em. Haven't come back to where I killed 'em either, even four years later." She gets to her feet, leans on the wall next to you. You feel her attention, though you still don't face her. "They get scared," she says. "So I'll show 'em fear. Kill their queens, collapse their tunnels. Teach 'em to be scared of the surface, just long enough to give the Mojave time to prepare. And when they come, we'll be ready."

Of course: it always comes back to the Mojave in the end. She'll commit any crime you can name for her little patch of dirt. Avoiding the mistakes she made with her other home, maybe, though she still claims she doesn't remember all that. Too many hard roads walked over the last thirty years for any one to stick in her head. You can believe that. Could even put it aside, for the sake of what she might achieve.

You're not going to make it easy for her, though.

"House would be proud," you say coldly. "You and your machines, cleansing the wastes."

"Fuck off," she retorts, scowling. "You and me both know, the second the council retires the securitrons, the Bear's comin' back to rub its balls all over our city. I don't like it either, but they gotta stay till we have other options." She breaks eye contact, rummaging through her pockets for cigarettes and lighter with quick, irritated movements. "Thought we were past snipin' at each other at this point."

You barely spare her a glance. She can complain all she likes; you need to hear the why of things, to hold her actions to the flame. See which remain and which burn away like the chemical fumes over the Rocky Mountain Arsenal.

"Not yet," you say. "You're too dangerous to let be."

She opens her mouth as if to argue, then breaks off, busies herself with her cigarette.

"Yeah," she says, after a couple of puffs. "Yeah, I hear you."

Doesn't sound like her. Slower than normal. Heavier. Like when a bighorner just escapes the hounds, so exhausted from the chase it can barely lift its horns.

Good. It's her only chance.

No, let's be honest: it's yours.

"Seems it's your turn for answers," you say. "Don't think you came to me for another history lesson."

For a second, you think she might be about to punch you, but the next instant all the fury has melted away and left her a tired old woman. It's startling. You don't think of her as a person who ages, and yet here's the proof: look at her now and you know that one day, even Courier Six will die.

"No," she says, in a soft voice without any hint of the usual fire. "No, I …" She waves a hand in search of words, the tip of her cigarette describing an uncertain red circle. "We have some things to discuss, Ulysses. 'Cause you, you knew what you were doin' when you told me about Christine, and you sent me to the fuckin' Sierra Madre."

* * *

You've died twice, a rare thing for a man not yet forty. The first time at Dry Wells – an old camp of your people, the Twisted Hairs, where you met the Legion to celebrate your joint conquest of Arizona, and where they thanked you by enslaving your people and crucifying those who resisted along Interstate 40. You bent your head a broken man and raised it as the property of Caesar.

The second was in the Divide, a little town that sprang up along the courier trails. A place that could have been home, until the courier delivered a package from Navarro that screamed loud enough to rouse America from its slumber – to activate the missiles buried in their silos, sending old world ghosts of fire and thunder roaring through the city streets. One woman, killing a fledgling nation with her carelessness.

It taught you a lesson you never wanted to learn. So you brought her back here, sent her a cryptic radio message. Knowing that she could never leave any road unwalked, any hints uninvestigated. Lured her through the Divide so she could see what she'd done, and used her to wake America again, send missiles at NCR. Open the way for the Legion to break her precious Vegas.

She followed you all the way to the end, just as you knew she would, and she threw your own words back at you, scavenged from the diaries you lost in the Divide: Zion and the Big Empty, communities and gods, the weight of history. Proof that she might one day walk the Mojave into life. Create a nation to replace the one she killed.

She broke you without firing a shot. Stopped your missiles through the kindness she showed the robot. Walked back to the Mojave with nothing but bruises, ready to sew herself a flag for her back the same as yours.

You watched her go, your heart and soul crumbling to ash like the Divide as it burned, and you knew that none of it meant a thing.

Because she's Courier Six. She doesn't know failure, reaches every new town at the end of a trail of blood and spent cartridges, and whatever she learned from you in the Divide, she'd forget it all the instant she found a new job, a new town, new lights shining on the horizon like the glittering snake eyes of Vegas.

* * *

You face each other across the tenuous concrete floor, two couriers at the peak of the world. Through the gaps between your feet, you can see a zopilote circling slowly, on the lookout for irradiated carrion; above you, the sky is as blank and white as the snowfall on the Rockies.

"I did," you say. "Something in you needs an answer, I'll give it. Not sure you're here for more words from me, though."

The courier looks at you, utterly expressionless. It might be the first time in all her life that she chose silence over speaking.

If that's what she wants, you can do it. You stand there too, staring into the polished mirrors of her sunglasses like you could drill straight through them into the mind beneath. You've seen her eyes once, when she took off her glasses to see you better in the gloom of the missile silo at the heart of the Divide. They were so dark they looked black; you couldn't help but think it fitting.

The moments pass like birds flying south for the winter. And then, like before, she sighs and takes off her sunglasses.

"When I came here," she says. "The first time, I mean, when you sent the message. You told me you knew I'd come, 'cause it ain't in me to let go."

You nod. It's true. That's why you said it.

"And when I got to the Madre, that's what the lady on the radio said too. 'Begin again, let go'."

She doesn't seem to have noticed, but her hand has gone to her neck, scratching a phantom itch. You've seen that gesture before, in slaves just uncollared. From the raw skin on her throat, she's been doing it a while.

Now you understand why the courier won't tell you what happened. Maybe it was Elijah, if he survived the Sierra Madre long enough to meet her; maybe there are just more horrors under that red cloud than you know. You didn't get close enough to find out.

Still. You have to admit, she must care for that Veronica woman a great deal to go through that on her behalf.

"All of us there, we had to let go of somethin' if we wanted to walk away again. Our obsessions. Dog was hungry, God needed control, Dean had all this hate, this greed …" She shakes her head. "And that ain't even mentionin' Elijah. But there was Christine, too. Obsessed with him. She couldn't let go. Not even at the end."

"And you?"

She starts at the sound of your voice, as if she'd forgotten you were here. Lost inside her history.

"Me?" she says. "Me, I … I think you know what I learned. I think that's why you told me Christine went to the Big Empty. I found your nest – and your tapes. You left those for me, didn't you? Knew I'd find 'em, like I found your logs in the Divide. You knew I'd figure out she went on to the Madre, and you knew I'd follow. 'Cause it ain't in me to let go."

You incline your head. It's true. Someone like her, who sees the whole world as a map to be filled out, point by point – she's easy to predict.

"No," you reply. "It isn't."

Another silence. Her cigarette burns out unnoticed between her fingers, still hanging at her side.

"I can't tell you the last time I left a job unfinished," she says. "I'd gone to the Empty for this, got all my organs ripped out, my horse butchered by robots, walked to the Madre and – and everything that happened there … and I let go. 'Cause if I hadn't, Christine and me would be dead right now. Or fillin' out a pair of hazmat suits, whatever it is happens to the people the Madre eats."

You wait. She needs to see this through before you comment on it.

"And I got back, and everyone was mad. And they were right. We're buildin' somethin', somethin' a little less evil, somethin' about _people_ , not caps or kings, and …" Her face twitches suddenly with a fury that you've never seen there before. "And I skipped out on it for five months 'cause I couldn't leave well enough alone. Just like last time, when I ran off to guard caravans in Utah, like – well, the Mojave needed me, _they_ needed me, everyone – and even then it didn't take, can you believe it? I thought I could keep right on being some courier walk-the-wasteland fuck."

That sneer, that venom – you're familiar with the anger she performs, but this is something else. Something real.

"And Veronica," she growls. "The way she looked at me when she heard, and that poor girl trapped in her obsession in that casin―"

She stops dead, about to say more than she intended. Looks at her cigarette as if she doesn't remember lighting it, then flicks it away out of the window.

"Well, anyway. Came to a decision." She runs her tongue nervously over her lips, takes a deep breath. Like a woman about to walk out to the headsman's block. "I can't do this no more."

She's been talking to somewhere past your shoulder for the past few minutes, but now she meets your eye. Cold. Determined. Afraid.

"I'm gonna destroy more than just the Divide if I carry on like this," she tells you. "And that's why Courier Six needs to die."

* * *

You could weep, if you were a weeping man. But you've shed your tears for Dry Wells, and since then your spring's run dry. If you could, though. If you could, you think you might now.

How long has it been? The better part of a decade now. Hunting the courier, following her trails around NCR, from town to town, solving problems with bullets and words. Figuring out a way to teach her what kind of monster she was.

The Sierra Madre was the last arrow in your quiver, after the platinum chip and the Divide both failed so spectacularly. You weren't even sure how to lure her there; it was a surprise to you when you mentioned a woman hunting an exiled Brotherhood elder and she started asking questions. Didn't know she was so loyal to the people she collects, that someone like her was capable of that kind of devotion.

You know now – heard her call them her kids, felt the love in her voice. The Twisted Hairs in you says that that's the only family a self-mutilated wretch like her could find; the Legion in you says it's more than any profligate deserves. The man in you tries to rise above these things, but it's hard to be anything other than the sum of one's history.

Still. If she's willing to try, then so are you. And you've been standing here staring for long enough.

"Didn't come here asking my permission," you tell her. "Don't know what you think you owe me, but …"

"Cut the shit," she says, a flash of irritation crossing her brow. "You been tryin' to kill me ever since you knew me, Ulysses. You're damn near an expert in it. And I … well, if we're bein' honest, I need your help."

"My help?" You fold your arms, shift your weight to your back foot. Didn't mean to – the courier latches onto these things, scenting weakness like Denver hounds – but even you can't always control yourself. "What could _you_ want with _my_ help?"

Her eyebrow twitches upward into an arch, but whatever acid remark is brewing in her, she holds it back.

"The man whose name you took," she says. "The American. You said he weren't made for peace. Won the war, but couldn't handle what came after."

You cock your head on one side, curious.

"You listened. Didn't think you had it in you."

She smiles ruefully.

"You and me both," she replies, taking a step towards you. "I'm what the kids call a real dumb bitch. But I figured it out in the end. I'm real good at bein' the courier, ain't I? Been doin' it all my life. I see somethin' in the distance, I gotta go there. Pull it apart, rip all the secrets out, solve the problems."

Another step forwards. You force yourself to stay where you are, to not step back.

"Brought that to the Mojave. Worked real good, right up till I found myself a family and a city. And that means …"

"… nobody needs the courier any more."

"No," she says. "They don't. Sometimes they think they do, but the truth is, if the Mojave can't survive without me, it's gonna fall to NCR the day I die." Her eyes are like the tunnels under the Divide, full of horrors. "I ain't no Tandi, kid, and I sure as shit ain't House or Caesar. I just wanna help my community help itself. Can't be solvin' all their problems for 'em forever." She sighs. "But I can't keep runnin' off after shiny things, either. They need me there to look at, till they realise they can do it for themselves. And my kids, they … well, if I keep on wanderin', one day there won't be people waitin' for me when I come home."

A long silence. You watch her closely, but you can't see any deceit in her. None of the usual bluff or bluster.

"If you believe in something enough," you tell her, "you have to be willing to let it burn, lest it claim you."

Last time you said that, she told you to quit talking in riddles. This time, she just sighs.

"Yeah," she replies. "Was a good story. Brought the whole Mojave to the negotiatin' table. But I'm too old to be a story any more." She holds out a hand. "So. Will you help me stop?"

You hold the moment high above your heads, showing her the size of it, the weight. Making sure she can feel what it is that's happening.

She does feel it. It's written in her expression, in the way she stands.

So. What will you say to her, courier?

You pause. Unhitch your breathing mask, show her your face for the first time.

"What would you have me do?" you ask, and the gratitude in her eyes is like nothing you've ever seen.

* * *

The courier – that's still who she is, for now – told her companions she was scouting ahead. Left instructions with Christine and Veronica to come after her if she wasn't back in an hour. And when they come, when they find the two of you here …

"… you just have to say my name," she says. "You know it, right? Not the fake ones I put on the Mojave Express manifests, the – the one I told you in the silo. I can't do it myself, can't – I don't know how to say it, can't break the illusion, maybe. What kinda friend is it who don't tell you her name? Actually," she adds, holding up a hand, "don't answer that, I really don't need another allegory right now. Just, uh … you know my name, right? You can say it?"

You give her your best incredulous look. This is … something, even by her standards.

"You need me to introduce you to your own people?"

She winces.

"Believe me, I know how dumb it makes me look, and I'm less self-aware than a woman who's had a conversation with her own disembodied brain has any right to be. But, uh, yeah. That's about the size of it."

"If it puts a stop to you―"

"Jesus, I hope so―"

"Let me finish."

She nods, claps one hand over her mouth and gestures for you to continue with the other.

"If it puts a stop to you," you repeat, "I will call you by your name." You pause, just long enough for her to take her hand off her mouth, then go on: "On one condition."

"Name it."

No hesitation. Good. It's what the world deserves of her.

"I know who Courier Six is," you tell her. "Saw her walk the West, the Mojave. Don't know the woman behind her, or what I'd unleash by resurrecting her. Divide's proof enough that acting without thinking leads nowhere good."

The courier chuckles.

"Who are you, that do not know your history, huh?"

You pointedly do not react. That memory – the gods of the Big Empty, cruel and capricious as the gods who tried your namesake's namesake – is not one you care to joke about. You nearly died. Coming away with the answers you got was almost worse.

"Jesus, and I thought Christine was a tough crowd." She sits, back braced against the crumbling concrete. Her movements are quick, annoyed. "Fine, then. Siddown and listen."

You sit, on the other side of the burnt-out campfire. Nothing behind you except a hundred-foot drop down to the courier's horse.

"You were about a third right, thinkin' I was a Legion spy," she says, lighting herself another cigarette. "I'm from Colorado. Came west 'cause of the Legion, but fleein', not spyin'. Mom was a caravan guard, Dad was from one of those little villages out there. One-night stand when her caravan stopped to trade. She came back when I was born and left me with him; I ran off after her when I was sixteen. Never did find her, but I found Phoenix. Ran with a gang called the Lucky Sixes, got a new name – my real name, the one you know. Cool tattoo, as well. 'S all that's left of 'em now, poor kids."

She lifts her head, blows a plume of smoke away into the sky.

"We used to do this dumb shit – you ever crushed up mentats and dissolved 'em in vodka? Well, I have, and I won fifty caps for drinkin' the whole thing without throwin' up or passin' out. 'S called a grey nosebleed, 'cause everyone had a friend of a friend who'd done it and had his brain come outta his nose."

She laughs to herself, mellow with memory.

"Those were the salad days. Terrific boyfriend. He had money, which was good 'cause my girlfriend had expensive tastes. All in fun, you know? We were kids, havin' a good time with knives and chems. And then … then we started hearin' about a fella name of Caesar, what had an army in need of a city."

No good humour now; there's a shadow on her face that you know only too well. You can almost taste the memory of genocide in her voice: another history, cut down by the gladius and left to rot by the side of the road. The thought leaves you breathless, even furious; you don't understand how someone can live through the Legion's conquest and come away so careless. After Dry Wells, you saw meaning everywhere. Couldn't look at someone without wondering what community it was that Caesar had cut away from them; couldn't look at a town without seeing America sleeping beneath it. And yet somehow this woman walked away from that and became Courier Six.

"Well, I knew what happened to the girls like me when the Legion came," she goes on, catching your eye. "We keep our ears to the ground and our friends close. Call it a survival instinct. This world wants us dead same as it did before the bombs fell."

You know that much. Anything that doesn't fit into the Legion must be hammered into shape until it either concedes or dies, whichever comes first. You've seen it. Sometimes you still do, when you think too much of your past.

"So me and my friends, we was some of the first outta town, back when everyone else was still sayin' that it was all a big fuss over nothin'. Went west. Some of us wound up in New Reno, which is a shithole but a real fun one for the kinda girl who plays with knives and thinks a grey nosebleed sounds like a good Saturday night, and that's where I got my courier job. Got the travel bug after the big trip west, see. Though I never dared go east again till I got offered double commission to take a novelty poker chip to Vegas."

She takes her cigarette from her mouth and holds it out over the abyss, tapping away the ash on the wind.

"You know the rest. I was an asshole kid who grew up into an asshole woman who got a job as an asshole courier and fell in love with an asshole city. Ain't the best story in the world, but it's mine."

It is. And there is one question that you have to ask.

"What village?"

She nods like she was expecting that.

"Would you believe me if I said Twin Mothers?"

You snort. The Twin Mothers: maybe the gentlest society in the east, prey to every passing beast and raider. Matriarchal, spiritual, unskilled at war. Soft target for the Legion, who enslaved them and took their powerful medicines to the battlefield. Nothing at all like Courier Six.

"Not sure I would, no."

She cackles, slaps her knee.

"Yeah, well, I wasn't a good Twin Mother. I mean, they're good people, but they got real strong ideas about what a man is, what a woman is. Part of why I left, so I could go off and be a girl. I mean, that and the fact the matriarch walked in on me gettin' railed by her son." She shakes her head. "Times like that, you test just how pacifist people really are, huh."

"Were."

Her smile fades, and you feel the cold fever of guilt brush lightly across your face. She does feel it, then. As you feel the weight of being the last Twisted Hair to carry the braids.

"Yeah," she says sadly. "Guess Caesar figured we were weak."

"You were," you tell her, because it's true, and because you know it will hurt her.

She sighs.

"Yeah," she agrees, the heaviness in her voice sinking you deeper into your bleak satisfaction. "We were."

A pause. The shame comes and goes again, like a bird flying in at one window and out at the other.

"Still brew bitter drink on the trail, though," she adds. "Give thanks to Diana for the broc and xander like my dad taught me, even though I ain't believed since Phoenix." She pauses for a moment, making a thoughtful movement of her head. "Might start again. Been thinkin' about faith a lot since the Madre."

"You, a religious woman?"

"Why do people keep sayin' that?" she asks, jabbing her cigarette at you. "I swear, y'all think I'm some kinda godless narcissist."

"I wonder why."

Might be a joke in someone else's mouth. In yours, it just sounds bitter. The courier takes it all the same, though – pulls a face, waves your words aside in a waft of pale smoke.

"Hmm," she says, rummaging in one of her many pouches. "Hey, uh … I always got the impression you weren't a drinkin' man, but I feel like the occasion might … well, you want some of this?"

You hesitate. Long years with the Legion have blunted your appetite for alcohol; ordinarily you wouldn't. And yet …

"All right," you say, holding out a hand. "For the east. What's left of it."

She laughs, surprised, and slops something foul-smelling into a pair of tin cups.

"Well, okay then. Here you are."

You take it, enjoying the spatter of stray drops on your hand, and raise your cup.

"To the Twin Mothers," you tell her, and make her grin again, broad and vicious as a nightstalker.

"To the Twisted Hairs," she says, clinking her cup against yours, and you both drink. Tastes just the same as the wasteland tequila your uncle used to brew, long ago in another life when you still had an uncle. "Ahh, that's the stuff." She smacks her lips, gives you a wry look. "Hey, would your dad be as mad about that toast as mine would?"

Maybe it's the moonshine. Maybe it's the fact that you're about to hammer the last few nails into Courier Six's coffin. Maybe – well, you could trace the maybes for years, hunt the why of it the rest of your life. But for whatever reason, and against every instinct in your body, you actually smile.

"Can't imagine any Twisted Hair would have a kind word to say about you sophists up on your cliffs."

And just for a second, the look on her face shocks the hate clean out of your heart.

* * *

Those Brotherhood women the courier calls her kids are along soon enough, riding up the slope from the collapsed overpass tunnel with the stiff discomfort of people unused to horseback. Christine has a huge scoped engine on her back that looks half rifle, half grenade launcher; the other, Veronica, has tied her power fist to her saddle and carries a carbine with obvious reluctance. You like her a little more for that. No one deserves death from a distance.

"Well, now the party's started," the courier says, knocking back the last of her liquor and leaning out over the edge. "Hey girls, up here! What took you so long?"

Veronica shades her eyes, peers up.

"Sixes?"

"Yeah!"

"What the hell are you doing up there?"

"Well, if you come on up, maybe I'll tell you!" The courier tosses you a glance over her shoulder. "Tch. The hell do they even teach these kids in scribe school?"

You keep your face motionless. It's been many years since you were last part of a family dispute. You aren't sure you can change that now, even if you wanted to. Life makes more sense for you viewed from a distance – observed, studied, not lived.

"Who are you talking to?" yells Veronica.

"Oh, for the love of― I really got no idea how to make this any clearer, sweetheart. Get. Your ass. Up here already!" She pulls her head back in the window, rolling her eyes, then remembers something and sticks it back out again. "Oh, and that means you too, Christine!" She settles back into her seat with a sigh; below, the Brotherhood women ride into the shadow of the arch, out of sight. "Jesus, kids these days. Y'know, back in my day, people showed their elders some respect." A pause. "I mean, _I_ didn't, but _people_ did."

She probably wants you to laugh, but if she thinks she can stretch whatever tenuous rapport you have to cover that, she's mistaken. You just give her a cold look over your cup.

"Okay, okay, I can take a damn hint."

Clanking and grunting from the collapsed gantry that acts as a ladder. You turn, and there they are. First Veronica, then … then Christine Royce.

She recognises you immediately. You see the shock in her eyes, the gape of her scarred mouth. Those are new: badly-healed lines at the edges of her lips, down her throat. The Madre wasn't any kinder to her than the Empty, it seems. Obsession always has its price.

"You," she says, reaching for the wall as if to steady herself. "I didn't ever think I'd …"

Different voice. Sounds like the woman on the Sierra Madre broadcast – but damaged, hoarse. Who did that to her? Why?

You won't ask. These answers – not yours to know.

"Wasn't expecting to see you here, either," you reply. "Good that you made it. I wouldn't wish the Madre on anyone."

Her face darkens, and for a moment you think she might ask why you didn't stop her going, but of course you both know the answer to that. She was chasing her own Courier Six, and you couldn't stand in her way.

"Yeah, well," she mutters. She looks like there are more words in her, but they don't make it out. In the Empty, when she was recovering in your hideout, she'd debate ethics with you all night; somehow, you can't imagine her doing the same now. Whatever she found in the Madre, it hasn't let go of her yet.

Veronica, watching her with furrowed brow, touches her arm; Christine pulls away sharply, violently – and a second later turns back again to take her hand, twisting her face into an uncomfortable smile of apology.

It seems well received. Veronica squeezes her hand gently and smiles back, though the effect is somewhat undercut by the hard look she throws at you a second later.

"Okay, so who the hell are you, exactly?" she asks. "'Cause I'm starting to get really sick of being the one guest at the party who doesn't know the host."

You glance at the courier, currently watching this little drama with an air of maternal benevolence. She doesn't seem interested in intervening.

"I'm known as Ulysses," you say, which is true enough; you had a name when you were Twisted Hairs, were given another when you were Legion, but here, to Courier Six and her makeshift family, you are Ulysses. "I'm a courier. Have some … history, with your friend. And with your …" Hard to tell what they are. Friends? Lovers? "With Christine."

"Ulysses pulled me out of the lab in the Big Empty," says Christine, before Veronica has a chance to ask. "I thought I was―" She cuts herself off, eye darting over to the courier, to her fellow victim. "Wait, so she – Wild Card's the courier you were chasing? Is that it?"

Wild Card. She accumulates these names, moss on the rolling stone of her legend. It's past time it came to a halt, but you'll pick your moment, make it count.

"That I am," says the courier. "Ulysses found me a long time ago. He's been hangin' out here in the Divide ever since. Point of fact, it was you who gave me the tip-off about Christine, ain't that right?"

"Wait, really?" Veronica's attention snaps back to you, the wary energy around her changing in an instant. "You did that?"

You hesitate. This is a very intense sort of scrutiny you're under, after four years speaking to no one but the courier. And, well, you have a feeling that Veronica would not take kindly to the revelation that you did it to teach her friend a lesson.

"Yeah." The courier, stepping in to shield you? You're beginning to suspect that she actually likes you, despite everything. Or perhaps because of it. "Ulysses is a real prince."

"Oh." Veronica lifts an eyebrow. "I, uh … well. In that case, Ulysses, I'm glad to meet you. And thanks. Seriously. Like a whole lot." She forces a smile. "I'm Veronica. I used to have a really good joke about living in a hole in the ground, but sadly I now live in a luxurious Vegas apartment."

You aren't a stupid man. But you have to admit, you have absolutely no idea what she's talking about.

"Right," you say, trying to think of something to say. "It's good to meet you. Was curious about the courier's family."

She isn't expecting that; you startle her into smiling for real.

"Hah. Well. Uh … yeah, I guess that's what I am. What we are." Her hand finds Christine's again. White knuckles, both of them: these two are much more desperate than either of them want you to know. "It's good to know a friend of Sixes. And of Christine."

Christine doesn't look convinced.

"Didn't think you were friends," she says. "You seemed―" Her voice dissolves into thick, wet coughs that shake her whole body and leave her leaning on Veronica's arm. "Ugh," she spits, annoyed at her own weakness. "Seemed like – ehagh – you two hated each other."

"Never said I didn't hate her," you reply, acting quickly before the courier can rattle off some absurd claim about being best friends since childhood. "She's more dangerous than Caesar."

Something flashes between the two Brotherhood women, so quick even you barely catch it.

"Kai-zar, huh," says Veronica, mimicking your Latinate pronunciation. "What are you, Legion?"

You let your distaste show in the jut of your chin, the flare of your nostrils.

"Didn't weep for him when your friend cut his throat, if that's what you're worried about."

"Cut his throat?" Veronica glances at the courier. "Huh. Haven't heard that version yet."

"Well," says the courier, her eyes lighting up, "lemme tell you …"

You catch her eye and she trails off, scowling.

"What?" she asks.

"Think we've heard that one before."

"What d'you― oh."

The silence stretches out, turning hard and leathery as a dead lakelurk in the sun. Christine takes a step back, a wary gleam in her eye like a wild mustang ready to bolt; Veronica moves slightly in front of her, one hand set protectively on her back.

"It's fine, sweetheart," says the courier quietly. "We're all good here." She sighs and gets up, pacing restlessly from campfire to window to empty crates and back again. "I got that Lucullus fella to take me there, same as usual," she says, fidgeting with her empty cup. "Shot him and the other guards on the gate the second I got off the boat. Then I flicked on a Stealth Boy I found at the old REPCONN test site and hoofed it up to Caesar's tent before anyone could raise the alarm."

She puts down the cup and pulls a knife from her boot – an ancient, shoddy-looking thing, its handle long ago broken and bound back together.

"Managed to slip in behind someone else while I was still invisible," she goes on. "Then I got up behind Caesar and cut his throat with this shitty knife my dad gave me when I was fourteen."

Now she's leaning against the window, one hand braced on the frame and the other turning the knife this way and that, the warped blade flicking the flat Divide light across the concrete. You can see it. That tent. The smell of heat, of sweat and dogs and many men in close proximity. The mighty Caesar on his throne. And the Twin Mothers, of all people, planting their steel in his throat.

You almost wish you'd been there.

"After that, I figured, hell, Vulpy Culty or whatever his name is, the guy who wears a dog as a hat, he's right there too, so I shot him. And that guy Lucius. And at that point there weren't any reason not to kill everyone else in there too. After that, I just had to get out. Which …" She bobs her head from side to side, grimacing. "Well, it's like I always say, you can't make an omelette without breakin' a few ribs. Got through a lotta bitter drink on my way to Doc Usanagi's."

Veronica and Christine exchange a look.

"That sounds weirdly like … the truth," says Veronica slowly. "I remember that. Usanagi called Arcade and he took me over. You looked like a picture out of a medical textbook. Like, Usanagi brought her students in and told them to take a good look, because it's not every day you get to see the spleen in its natural habitat. But you wouldn't tell us what had happened." She glowers suspiciously. "Who are you and what have you done with the real Sixes?"

"Well, pardon me for bein' honest," mutters the courier. "Ain't that what family's all about?"

Christine coughs, instantly capturing all of Veronica's attention. She's like a hummingbird around a bush in bloom, flitting constantly between a dozen different touches: elbow, back, hand, shoulder. Christine takes it well. Has trouble acknowledging it, but you can see the longing in her eyes.

"Not sure anyone here has ever seen a healthy family except in pictures," she says, with an unexpected dry wit that almost startles you into smiling, before you catch yourself.

"Yeah, well, I … actually, fair point." The courier sighs. "Tryin' to make one, though. Should be honest with all you kids."

She should. But you never thought she would – or even that she could.

"Yes," you say. "It's good to hear the how of it."

Her mouth twitches.

"Figure you'd appreciate that. Even if you still ain't figured out possessive apostrophes just yet."

Well, you weren't expecting her to stop being rude. But at least she's learned to tell the truth.

You cast your eye over the campsite: courier, Veronica, Christine. The three of them have collected in a knot together at the other end of the room, though you can't really say how they ended up there. Like some force has drawn the three of them together, invisible and ineluctable as the pull of the earth on falling leaves.

It's time. You can almost hear the crackling of the funeral pyre.

"Yes," you say. "Didn't expect honesty from you. Glad to receive it, Sin."

And the Divide falls as silent as it did the day after the missiles buried it in ash.

* * *

"What?" Christine scowls, pins you with her flat, icy stare. "What was that?"

You look at Courier Six. But the woman who responds is Sin Mothers.

"That's me," she says, in a slow, tentative voice. The faintest trace of an accent to her words. One you haven't heard in a very, very long time. "That's … my name." She looks up, a smile touching her eyes. "That's my name!"

"Your name," repeats Veronica. "Your name is …"

"Sin. Sin Mothers. Don't tell me I never told you."

"Of course you didn't tell us," croaks Christine. "You never tell anyone."

"Sweetheart, c'mon. Would I lie to you?"

"Constantly."

"Wow." Sin turns to you, hands spread. "You see what I have to put up with?"

You raise your cup to your lips and keep silent. You didn't survive the Divide to fall victim to some petty argument.

"Hey. Sixes – Sin, whatever―"

"You can call me Sixes if you like. Or Wild Card, whatever. Love me a good nickname. Reminds me of my gang days."

"Your―? No, wait, don't distract me." Veronica takes a breath. "What I mean is … why are we really here?"

"We're really here to drive out the tunnellers. But …" Sin shrugs. "I figure, I been a courier long enough."

Veronica stares at her for a moment. You stare too, trying to find what it is she sees or thinks she sees in Sin's face, and then look away sharply as she pulls her into a tight embrace.

"Aw," you hear Sin mutter, mock-embarrassed. "Sweetheart."

"Shut up, Sixes."

"All right."

It only lasts a few seconds, but it feels like forever. You're not good at touch, not even seeing it. Been the better part of a decade since you so much as felt a hand on yours.

"Swear you didn't used to be this mushy," says Christine dryly.

"It's called character development," retorts Veronica, pulling away. "Besides, I know you want a hug too."

Christine starts coughing again, which strikes you as extremely convenient; Veronica rolls her eyes and pats her on the back.

"Smooth, Chris. Real smooth."

Look at Sin: proud as a mother nightstalker crouched over her brood. Even you have to admit, she wears this well – and it's that, more than anything, that makes you realise it's over. Clean kill. You struck the first blow out of hate, but these two will finish her off with love.

And that means there's nothing here for you any more.

"I'm keeping you from your work," you say, finishing your drink and holding out the empty cup for Sin to take. "Your people will be worried."

"Kickin' us out so soon?" she asks, wiping the cups down on her sleeve and tucking them back into her pouch. "Well, I guess you're probably sick of me by now, huh." She hesitates. "Uh … look, I know you hate Vegas, but it ain't the only town in the Mojave. And, well, I feel like it'd be ungrateful of me if I didn't remind you there's a world outside this irradiated hellhole."

You snort. She just can't help herself, can she?

"I'm not coming with you, Sin. Not even for the east."

She sighs.

"Yeah, I figured. But I had to try." She holds out a hand. "See you next time, then. Remind me to bring my violin, I got a new song I think you'll like."

You won't. If she comes back again, she won't find you. Your obligations to her are discharged; now, you belong solely to the Divide, to this place you killed for the third time.

"All right," you lie, shaking her hand. "Next time."

If she sees through you, she doesn't say anything. But she doesn't smile, either, which you'll take gladly.

"Nice meeting you," says Veronica, waving awkwardly. "Uh, thanks again."

"Yeah." Christine nods. "Thanks."

She holds your eye for longer than you'd like, but you make sure not to look away. You have to respect her, as someone who's walked the same path as you.

They go. Sin first, swinging easily down the collapsed gantry like someone who's been climbing since she was a child, then Veronica, with the graceless movements of a woman more at home below ground than high above it. Then – but no. Christine is still here, still looking at you.

"Thought you'd squared your debt," you say. "Something else you need?"

Veronica's head reappears over the lip of the way down to the road.

"Chris?"

"Just a second, Ronnie." She has a hardness about her face that doesn't go away, but when she looks at Veronica, it turns as soft as you've ever seen it. "Need a word with Ulysses."

"O … kay. I'll let Sixes know."

She smiles, an unasked question caged behind her lips. Christine makes an attempt at smiling back as she watches her withdraw.

"Never seen two people try as hard as you," you say, although it isn't really your business.

"We have to," says Christine, still looking at the spot where Veronica was. "It's been nearly fourteen years." She turns to you. "When I'm with her and Wild Card, I believe we can do it."

You raise an eyebrow. You're beginning to suspect that her desire to see Elijah dead had less to do with the Brotherhood's mission than she claimed back in the Empty.

"You've changed since last we spoke."

"Sierra Madre," she says, which you agree is an explanation all on its own. "You … didn't send Wild Card there to save me, did you?"

Direct. Very direct. You don't want to insult her by denying it.

"No," you admit. "I didn't."

She nods. You don't detect any anger, which is more worrying than if you did.

"Thought so," she says. "So you sent her to learn how to be …" She thinks for a moment, then frowns and waves a hand. "Doesn't matter. You know. Not like she is."

"Yes."

She nods again. Then she takes a sharp step forward and punches you in the face.

It's a solid hit; you see stars for a second, stumbling back and cracking your head against the crumbling wall. Through the flashes, you see Christine's face, blurry, motionless.

"You're lucky you saved my life, or I'd push you right out that window," she says, voice dangerously calm. "Don't know what this feud's really all about, but you didn't have the right to do that. Not to anyone. Not to her."

You grunt, straightening up and gently feeling at the tender flesh around your eye. Already tightening.

"You don't know who she," you begin, letting your anger seep coldly into your voice – but unlike Sin, Christine has no interest in hearing you out.

"I know who she is," she says. "I know she's kind enough to come to the Sierra Madre twice, just for me. I know she threw herself at four paladins in power armour because they came for Ronnie. And I―"

The cough returns suddenly, like a string of grenades going off inside her. You could take the opportunity to reply, but you can't: twice? She went _twice?_ The paladins you can believe, but – the Sierra Madre? Twice? Even Sin wouldn't do that.

Unless she really loved someone, perhaps.

"And I – ugh – know obsession too," she wheezes, gesturing at herself, her heaving chest. "I – ehagh – this fucking cough, my broken voice, busted head, that's because I couldn't let go. And you …" She clears her throat, spits red out of the window into the white Divide air. "You're too smart to be kidding yourself about what you're doing here."

A pause. You aren't quite sure how to respond to that. Sin's accused you of hypocrisy before, but she'll say anything, do anything, to bully her way through a situation. Christine, though …

"Another thing I know about Wild Card," she tells you. "She knows when to walk away."

You stare, vision narrowing as your eye starts to swell, but you can't find a single word with which to respond. Sin? _Sin_ knows how to walk away? What is she―?

"You were good to me," she says. Leaning in close, her hands tight bundles of bone and taut skin. "And Wild Card― and Sin likes you. So I figure I – ehagh – owe it to you to tell you to get over yourself. That's all."

She leaves then, without saying goodbye or waiting for an answer. You stand there for a moment, lost in the turning of your thoughts, and then you come back to yourself and cross to the window, from where you see her and the others riding back down the High Road towards their army.

Just before the ramp down to the tunnel mouth, Sin reins in her horse, turns to raise a hand in farewell. Your own hand rises by itself, almost without you realising – and then she and her family are gone, back into the shadows beneath the collapsed overpass.

Beneath your feet, that circling zopilote cries out, slow and mournful. It tilts a wing and soars out from beneath the arch, heading east towards the canyon pass, towards Vegas and the bloodstained wall across the Colorado. Towards the communities of the Mojave and the union they're building. Towards Sin and her home.

You think about her, going twice to the Madre. You think about Christine punching you, about Veronica holding her hand. You think about the last Twin Mother stabbing Caesar in the neck and stumbling away full of bullets and smashed cartilage.

You close your eyes. Breathe in the bitter Divide air.

A dead society yet lives, in a piece of steel, in a matriarch and the daughters she's found. Lesson in that, maybe. The Twin Mothers always were about lessons.

You open your eyes and pick up your staff, strap your mask back into place around your head. You take one last look at the ruins around you, at the debris heaped over the sleeping body of America – and then you climb down from the arch and begin to walk.

Hard to say where exactly you're going. But you're sure you'll know it when you arrive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! Thank you for reading my essay badly disguised as fix-it fic. It means a lot to me; I’ve had this story in my head for a long, long time, but I never gave myself the time to write it until now. Anyway, since we’re done, here are a few notes about the story you just read.
> 
> One, the order of events. I’ve rearranged events a bit here, obviously: Sin fought for an independent New Vegas at Hoover Dam in 2282, the canon date, and completed her trip to the Divide just before. She went to Zion a year or two later, unable to resist the chance to wander again, and travelled through the Big Empty to the Sierra Madre in 2285. Best not to think about the geography of it; in real life, the Empty wouldn’t be en route to the Madre. But it made for a better story this way, and that’s reason enough to cheat the cartographers a little, I think.
> 
> Two, the Courier. For anyone who didn’t pick it up, she wears the blackjack variant of the courier duster (albeit, like, a hypothetical version with sleeves), carries That Gun, and favours the best eyewear and second-best hat in the game, the authority glasses and desperado cowboy hat, respectively. You can brew her godawful coffee substitute with 15 Survival and _Honest Hearts_ installed. Her tattoos are based on the set of promotional playing cards that shipped with the collector’s edition of _New Vegas_ , where suits represent factions and individual cards are specific characters. The exception, by design, is her original pair of sixes, which belong to Sin and not the Courier.
> 
> Three, the music. Sin’s songs aren’t real – she wrote them herself, after all – but it’d be remiss of me to not point out what they owe to songwriters much more skilled than me. ‘Holy Water’ is loosely inspired by [Holy Locust’s ‘Tangled in Ropes’.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9P3LcuLlQ1I) ‘Lost and Lonesome’ is inspired by, and can be sung to the tune of, [Darren Korb’s ‘Mourning Song’,](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBi5Dd1vn4A) from _Pyre_. The chapter titles are all songs used in _New Vegas_ as the names of quests – except the final one, which is of course a Mischief Brew song. There are a few reasons for that. I’m sure at least three of them are very obvious.
> 
> Four, the Twin Mothers. They’re very lightly referenced in _Lonesome Road_ , in which Ulysses introduces them as the original creators of bitter drink – but they were intended to appear more fully in the cancelled _Fallout 3_ by Black Isle, _Van Buren_ (which is also where some of Ulysses’ other references to the east come from), and my characterisation of them draws on that. [You can find more about them here.](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Twin_Mothers)
> 
> Five, blasphemy. Obviously Christianity didn’t survive the apocalypse in _Fallout_ , save among the Mormons of New Canaan, but I figured that that doesn’t always mean that ingrained linguistic habits change, particularly as people still seem to say things like 'oh my god', often without knowing what they refer to. Sin has absolutely no idea what she means when she says ‘Jesus’; it’s just a curse to her. If you asked her, she’d probably say it was a sex thing. She’s that sort of person.
> 
> Six (it’s always six!), what’s next. I think I might have more to say about Sin and her family, but this is all we need to know about the death of Courier Six. This story wandered through the DLCs to mine their thematic concerns; if there’s more, it will look a bit closer to home. Can’t say when, really. If it happens, it happens.
> 
> That’s it! Thank you again. I’m very grateful to anyone who read all this; all your responses have surprised and delighted me. You rock. <3


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